At 10:49 PM 18-05-97 +0800, Miguel A.L. Paraz wrote:
What I would advocate here - though it is probably less feasible in the North American context - is application level multihoming. For mail, backup MX'es for inbound, and smarthosts for outbound. For Web access, if the ISP operates a proxy cache for its customers, the customers' actual IP address becomes irrelevant. There has been some discussion in the Squid users' mailing list about this, and we (the Squid contributors) are looking into means and ways of making upstream switchover more transparent.
And I would have the web servers addressed with overlays, using DNS to switch between ISP addresses. Another point; application level switching allows the routes to be pre-established, leading to less delay, less route flapping, and better maintenance.
Granted, running caches in our part of the world (across the Pacific from MAE-West) is a must for reasonable performance at reasonable cost.
Even with HTTP 1.1, caches and mirrors are good performance enhancements because no one point is close to every other point on the Net. --Kent