[RndTbl] Multihoming

Sean Walberg sean at ertw.com
Wed Jun 6 19:00:31 CDT 2007


On 6/6/07, Kevin McGregor <kmcgregor at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> A more complete discussion can be found at (surprise!) Wikipedia:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multihoming
>
> I'm leaning more toward John's position, but it's still not entirely clear
> to me.


I think that article is pretty crummy, even by Wikipedia standards.

A multihomed host sits in two different subnets.  By that definition,
Trevor's box is multihomed.  So is my Linux box at home with one Shaw
connection and one private LAN connection -- it has a routing decision to
make, albeit very simple.  Two connections to the same L2 network like
described in the wikipedia article isn't multihoming it's layer 2
redundancy.  Don't even get me started on their "two addresses, one
interface"

But I haven't heard that definition used in years.  Nowadays, multihoming
implies two different carrier connections and BGP, giving both outbound
**and inbound** redundancy (DNS-fu doesn't count).

Put another way, at my job we've got two big connections to the same carrier
(active/passive), using BGP to handle the failover and route advertisement,
and we still don't describe ourselves as multihomed.

Sean



-- 
Sean Walberg <sean at ertw.com>    http://ertw.com/
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