On Tue, 16 May 2000, Roeland M.J. Meyer wrote:
ww@shadowfax.styx.org: Tuesday, May 16, 2000 10:34 PM
What is the general feeling about running routing protocols on web/dns/mail servers?
Technically, not a problem. However, there is a school of thought that thinks that to be a bad policy. That routing functions should be on appliance-level systems, like routers. There is also some merit in that appliances are more reliable, mainly because nothing *else* can cause an ... reboot a system, at times. If that system is ALSO a critical router then the entire net is down until the reboot is complete. It is generally not
Running a routing protocol on a unix box doesn't mean you're using it as a router. Perhaps he just wants OSPF on a few servers so they can send their packets more efficiently. Consider a case where you have a few access servers and unix servers on the same switch and a router connecting that POP to your backbone. Having a routing protocol on those unix boxes means they can send packets directly to the appropriate access server (or the router) rather than everything to the router, just to have it spit the packets back out headed for an access server on that segment. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Jon Lewis *jlewis@lewis.org*| I route System Administrator | therefore you are Atlantic Net | _________http://www.lewis.org/~jlewis/pgp for PGP public key__________