Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:19:06 +1000 From: "Christopher Martin" <outsidefactor@iinet.net.au> To: "'Baldur Gislason'" <baldur@foo.is> Cc: 'FreeBSD Net Mailing list' <freebsd-net@freebsd.org> Subject: RE: Multiple routes to the same destination Message-ID: <50v528$fvu0nd@iinet-mail.icp-qv1-irony1.iinet.net.au> In-Reply-To: <20060623120208.GH36671@gremlin.foo.is>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: Baldur Gislason [mailto:baldur@foo.is] > Sent: Friday, 23 June 2006 10:02 PM > To: Christopher Martin > Cc: FreeBSD Net Mailing list > Subject: Re: Multiple routes to the same destination > > Well, round robin is really not what you want with IP packets. > And how are you going to detect that a route is good without a routing > protocol? > Actually, round robin is exactly what I want. And I am not saying I don't use a routing protocol, in fact I do, but I want packets to be able to use two or more diverse paths of equivalent cost. It would seem that you are assuming that I want to load balance two internet connections which are NATed, in which case round robin might have issues with lost TCP sessions and weird reactions from servers as the apparent source address changes from packet to packet, but in a routed internal network the source address will not be changed by the router, thus negating that issue. It did seem at some stage someone was going to include it in OpenBSD: http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article&sid=20040425183024&mode=expanded To quote: "...OSPF also supports multipath equal cost routing". It's more of a case where we would like to use BSD as a router/packet filtering firewall for sites with multiple WAN links between each site, of equal size, and not have one site idle until the other fails over. Round robin is better than what we have: nothing.
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