On Tue, 20 May 2008, William Herrin wrote:
Hi folks,
An administrative question about multihoming:
I have a client who needs to multihome with multiple vendors for reliability purposes, currently in the Northern Virginia area and later on with a fail-over site, probably in Hawaii. They have only a very modest need for bandwidth and addresses (think: T1's and a few dozen servers) but they have to have BGP multihoming and can afford to pay for it.
The last I heard, the way to make this happen was: Find a service provider with IP blocks available in ARIN's set of /8's that permit /24 announcements (networks 199, 204-207), buy a circuit and request a /24 for multihoming. Then buy circuits from other providers using that ISP's /24 and an AS# from ARIN.
Is that still the way to make it happen? Are there alternate approaches (besides DNS games) that I should consider?
They should just get their own /22 from ARIN. If the future fail-over site doesn't help them show a /23's worth of justification, break out the ultimate fudge factor: SSL. Yes, I know, some would argue this isn't responsible usage of community resources. However, if I was representing the interests of a company whose existence relies on working connectivity, my biggest concern would be provider independance. Altruism is something I encourage my competitors to indulge in. In fact, the increasing value and decreasing pool of prefixes should motivate any proper capitalist to air on the side of being greedy: just as they aren't making any more land, they aren't making any more IP(v4) space. My gut instinct has been telling me for half a decade that prefixes will get commoditized long before IPv6 settles in, and if I was representing the interests of a company who was in the situation you describe, I would certainly want to prepare for that possibility. ARIN really should allow direct allocation of /24s to multi-homed organizations. It wouldn't increase the table size, and it would reduce the wasteful (best common) practice I describe above. Andy --- Andy Dills Xecunet, Inc. www.xecu.net 301-682-9972 ---