On Wed, 3 Oct 2001, E.B. Dreger wrote:
The "BGP uninformed" ask, "Why can't traffic just choose one of two paths?" To them, it's all "The Internet"... routing is black magic behind the scenes that "just works", and all traffic should be able to use all of their connections.
Actually it is not too hard to get this to work for outgoing traffic. Just give the box two addresses and point a route over the second connection. All TCP and UDP traffic the box initiates over this route will automatically have the right source address so the traffic comes back the same way. The problem starts with incoming connections. (And possibly Windows is too stupid for this.) This is how I got my first job with an ISP, way back when...
However, I've encountered [consulting] customers with multiple _dialup_ connections who want to know if they can just balance traffic across both. I think that the demand is there -- current products just don't allow it.
That's why we need multi address multihoming. And Mobile IP already makes it possible to change addresses in mid-communication, so we're halfway there.