On Wed, 1 Mar 2000, David Israel wrote:
The documentation is pretty vague on a few points, but it looks like all it does is NAT and (possibly, it's very bague on this point) resolve DNS for servers based on what it thinks is the best path to use. There's just a static route on your side; the customer gets a network from each ISP, and the LinkProof NATs to whichever network it thinks is best.
Good points: He isn't peering with you. You don't need to do anything to support this. Just statically route him and let him do the rest.
Bad points: He asked if you support it; ergo, he doesn't know how it works. Prepare your NOC/customer service folks for this guy to call in and bitch if the thing fails. It's also wasteful of IP addresses if the guy's got a big network back there, since he has to number every machine seperately for every connection he's got. Lastly, they're really vague in the online docs on how, exactly, they redirect traffic going to the customer. They just say they redirect it, and later say that the box will be "taking responsibility for... DNS support for resources that need to be accessed from the Internet." Sounds iffy to me.
In short, if it were my customer, I'd say something like, "It's your funeral. Have a ball." Only I'd say it nicely.
Oy. This stuff seems similar to what I ran on my home network(NAT plus smart DNS servers that gave out IPs on the links that were up). It worked semi-decent, only that failover sometimes took ages because of all the DNS caches in the world which don't care which TTL you set, or have a notion of 'minimal TTL' below which they won't accept your records, end clients caching records infinitely (well, until the next reboot/app restart). All in all, I'd say it works in 95% of cases, and certainly good enough for home network, but using it in enterprise connectivity is silly. -- Alex Pilosov | http://www.acecape.com/dsl Acecape, Inc. | AceDSL:The best ADSL in Bell Atlantic area 325 W 38 St. Suite 1005 | New York, NY 10018 |