On Sat, 14 Dec 1996, Nick Busigin wrote:

The NANOG list has been uncharacteristically quiet as of late... just checking to see if you are all still alive.

Here's something to chew on. As an end-node site who has recently become triply-homed I've been wondering whether it would be useful if routers had a way of making a route selection based on output queue levels. Ie., let's say I have 2 paths to a destination of equal as-path distance through neighbor A and neighbor B. Based on recent discussion it sounds like IOS will send the packet to the neighbor with the lowest IP address. This is nice and predictable, but I wonder if it would be helpful to have an option that makes this decision be based on current output load of the link to each neighbor rather than IP address. Note, I am not suggesting in any way that this alter advertisements and causing flapping, I am only wondering about outgoing packets. Off the top of my head, the big problem I see with this in IOS, for example, is that I believe the BGP routes are put into the IP routing table as they are received or when a link goes down. Doing the above would require that the IP routing table store routes of equal weight. Ramifications of this would be extensive, I imagine. Chris