On Sun, 2 Jan 2005, Edward B. Dreger wrote:

CLM> From: Christopher L. Morrow CLM> as a start, dropping HSRP and just managing 2 BGP peers from both CLM> ends one with metric 0 and one with metric 10 toward his ISP should CLM> satisfy all parties requirements. It should be a 'standard' config CLM> for the ISP and should be very simple for his customer to manage as CLM> well.

Correct. I'd actually prefer RFC1998-style communities to select LOCAL_PREF, but I'm waiting to suggest that. Yes, it's standard, but being standard hasn't helped me so far. :-/ Their ASN was registered Q4 2003, so it's possible they're new to BGP. I hate to speculate about experience and clue level based on ASN number, but there's probably some empirical, macroscopic statistical validity.

What apears to be missing here is a reflection on the various meanings of standard. I can think of at least two in this context: - Commonly done in the industry. An experienced engineer hired away from another ISP would be able to support it. - Commonly done at a particular ISP. That ISP's support people would have no trouble with it. It appears to me that you're working from the first definition. That's fine if your goal is to get the ISP to "productize" your request and sell it to lots of customers, or if their support staff all has lots of experience supporting such a product elsewhere. If, on the other hand, your ISP is hring their graveyard shift support staff from the local restaurants and grocery stores, the second definintion is a lot more useful. The support staff will quickly end up well-versed in the things they get lots of calls about, but will likely be completely mystified when confronted with your one-off. Since having an outage and being told that the one person who knows how to fix it is on vacation and unreachable is rarely a good thing, I suspect you'll be much happier in the long run if you either find a way to work within your ISP's well supported products, or find an ISP that's already in the habit of doing what you're asking for. Otherwise, you'll end up in conversations like one I had several years ago, with the support department of what's now a well-respected international backbone: Me: Hi. We have a connection to you that appears to be down right now. Support guy: Is this a T1 or a T3? Me: We're in the cage next to you in the colo facility. It's an ethernet cable running across the floor. Support guy: Hmm... I'm not familiar with... ethernet? -Steve