Peter Francis wrote:
<snip>
Any business needs: 1. to be able to change upstream providers without having to renumber.
Why? Intelligent use of DNS and dhcp make renumbering only a minor inconvenience.
2. to be able to change access providers without having to suffer multi-month down-times.
Mission/business critical services should be in a co-lo anyway and not off a DSL line.
I don't advise use of DSL regardless, but why is a colo better than a hardened facility owned by a company, with off-grid power, and multiple DS-3 lines? Just because that company only needs 200 public IP addresses, why should they be unable to multi-home? It's entirely possible to build a mission critical data center better than the average colo, and certainly more secure than many colos. There's a TECHNICAL issue here in HOW to implement multihoming successfully. We have a policy issue at ARIN, APNIC and RIPE which is keeping the issue from becoming one which people pay enough attention to. If it were in our faces more, perhaps better solutions would be proposed and implemented.
3. to be able to have its net-block(s) visible regardless of which ISPs they are currently using.
How do you propose doing this without growing the routing table 1-2 orders of magnitude?
We can't. The point, though, is that the Internet needs to have a GOOD way to support multihoming. We presently DO NOT have a good mechanism for this. The IPv6 approach to this does not appear workable either. This is a problem for the IETF, not NANOG, though, to solve. Getting people to understand there IS a problem needing a solution appears to be more than half the battle.
Currently the only ones that can do that are those that; 1. Are large enough to justify a /20 (begging the question of how they got that large). 2. Can afford their own datacenter.
It looks like our technical solutions are raising unreasonable barriers to entry for small businesses.
No. Co-lo your website and "intranet". Get two T1's that same provider via two different entry points/carriers to your office (if possible) and you should be about as rock solid you could expect for $2-3000/month or there abouts.
Great. So when this one upstream provider screws up, you're still dead. When there's a routing table problem and that upstream's advertisement for your block isn't seen by 1/2 the world, you're dead. We HAVE built an environment where businesses are forced into such situations UNLESS they are lucky enough to have grabbed IP address space early in the life of the 'net, or are big companies. Colo isn't always the answer.
Peter
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------- Daniel Senie dts@senie.com Amaranth Networks Inc. http://www.amaranth.com