[nsp] inbound failover without BGP?

[Florian Weimer]

Sergio Ramos <sramos@gibnet.net> writes:

> LinkProof: http://www.radware.com/content/products/link.asp
>
> "LinkProof provides intelligent inbound and outbound load balancing while
> eliminating the complexities of traditional routing protocols like BGP.
> Smart NAT mechanism provides simplified management of IP address ranges
> assigned to the network by various ISPs."

How do they control the inbound traffic?

The FAQ claims:

| If an ISP link is down, only available IP addresses are used for
| inbound traffic.

But how do you change the IP address of an existing connection?

> Warp: http://www.fatpipeinc.com/warp/
>
> "WARP dynamically load balances over multiple ISPs without the need for BGP
> programming."

This one uses DNS, so failover breaks existing connections.  

It seems that these solutions were built with web traffic in mind, and
they won't guarantee "100% uptime" (whatever this means) as advertised
because one can't set the DNS TTL to 0 (or any such a low value; if
you do, servers might increase it).

I'm all in favor of reducing complexity, but this doesn't really solve
all the multi-homing issues, I'm afraid.  Not even close.

-- 
Florian Weimer 	                  Weimer@CERT.Uni-Stuttgart.DE
University of Stuttgart           http://CERT.Uni-Stuttgart.DE/people/fw/
RUS-CERT                          fax +49-711-685-5898