[c-nsp] Traffic Engineering Internet links automatically

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Kim Onnel wrote:

> You mean that you have enough that you dont need to keep moving ?

Yes.

> Well, in our case, we want to tailor it to do the maximum utilization
> possible, so any few megabits is useful, i dont think that prepending and
> communities are the way ?

In the eBGP speaking world, your options are typically some mix of 
prepending, communities, and altering local-pref on your side, depending 
on your architecture and how automated your routing-policy-modification 
mechanism is.

Generally, you want to keep sufficient headroom on your ingress/egress 
links to allow you to absorb traffic spikes without added latency or 
packet loss.  Trying to keep all of your external links filled to 
the maximum possible capacity is a losing proposition and the staff time 
you burn may offset a good chunk of the cost savings you may be looking 
for.

Having been down this road before (not by my choice :-)  ), the game of 
stuffing X Mb/s of traffic into X Mb/s of available bandwidth gets more 
than a little frustrating.

jms