Re: BGP on dialup links?

Justin W. Newton (justin@priori.net)
Thu, 24 Jul 1997 12:08:25 -0700

At 10:46 AM 7/24/97 -0700, patrick@namesecure.com wrote:
>On Thu, 24 Jul 1997, John Storms wrote:
>
>>
>> Lets say though that you set up a BGP router to only advertise one or two
>> routes to your provider, who also have to be running BGP, to advertise them
>> to the Internet. I guess this would work over a smaller bandwidth since
>> you are not receiving incoming routes. The upstream BGP speaker would have
>> to be configured to only accept information from you and not to send it.
>> Blocking it on your end would be pointless because the bandwidth would
>> still get choked with incoming data.
>
>While I have no opinion on rather Livingston should implement this or not,
>as someone pointed out, this service is currently being offered for
>Emergency back-up routing, by a very clueful person, so it must work...

Its actually not a bad way to do backup transit to a low bandwidth site. I
don't know of a lot of ISPs that could survive on an ISDN connection for
long though. This is basically a backup transit setup for very small
sites. (Being at 1/12th your normal bandwidth isn't a lot better than
being at 0).

>
>> The only other application I can think of for using BGP over a dialup
>> connection is if you decided to use BGP as an internal gateway protocol
>> (IGP). This also is not a good idea. OSPF should be used internally and
>> BGP should be used externally, but since BGP is a routing protocol to
>> distribute routing information, technically, though bad form it can be
>> done. Using BGP as and IGP is like swatting flys with a sledge hammer,
>> you'll probably kill the fly, but you risk breaking things as well.
>> Vice-versa using a dialup connection to run BGP is like using a fly to swat
>> a sledge hammer.
>
>I think you are talking about Livingston's implementation of BGP. Cisco
>has iBGP specifically designed for use as an IGP.

iBGP sucks, actually (IMHO).

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Justin W. Newton voice: +1-415-482-2840
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