[nsp] BGP tweaking possibility

[Ejay Hire]

On the commercial front, Sockeye Networks has a box that does this.
We're are testing one in our network, and I can't offer an opinion yet.

-----Original Message-----
From: Gerald [mailto:gcoon at inch.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 16, 2003 10:46 AM
To: Tony Tauber
Cc: cisco-nsp at puck.nether.net
Subject: Re: [nsp] BGP tweaking possibility


On Wed, 16 Jul 2003, Tony Tauber wrote:

> > From: Charles Sprickman <spork at inch.com>
> > To: Gerald <gcoon at inch.com>
>
> Do you guys work together or something?

...or something. :-)

> Very true.  There's no mechanism to cut traffic up by volume.
> The best you'll be able to do is trial and error unless you get
> into some kinky netflow stuff.  Even then, you're making a config
> based on some statistics, not causing the router to make a decision
> based on load.

That's kind of the automated version of what we are currently doing.
MRTG
+ modifying route prefs & prepends.

> You might do better to take both transit and non-transit routes and
> depreference the transit ones so they're only used in case of a
> failure of the preferred path.

My understanding of that is if one of the ISP's changes their network
slightly after I put that in place, that could throw off my fine tuning.
I'm hoping to make it an internal router decision based on bandwidth.

I've had 2 good suggestions off list so far. One is a commercial
solution
(ick) ...and the other I don't fully understand yet so I have to go do
more Cisco reading. The recurring cisco wording from the other
suggestion
on and off list is to use "Policies" to do what I want. /me grabs Cisco
dictionaries/URLs to read up on what policies will do.

Anyone actually done this that could e-mail me off or on list?

> You could act on the communities on routes that you're hearing from
> others, which would affect outbound traffic.  Some providers will
> act on communities you send to them in order to change the preference
> of a route relatively up or down somewhat which will affect inbound
> traffic.

Like AS-Prepends? Already doing that and not getting the results I want
yet.

> (Ignore pages that involve MPLS which is often mentioned in the same
> breath with traffic engineering but is not relevant here.)

Suggestions like this that point me away from things that can distract
me
from the goal are much appreciated.

Thanks for the help and suggestions,

Gerald
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