Re: a multihomed net

Today I multihomed a customer using only two disjoint PA spaces.

            PA1 PA2
        P1---=---Wall---=---P2
                  |
                ------ RFC1597
                   |
                 Server

"Wall" speaks GateD and collects full routing from P1's and P2's wires,
which in my case are "null hub" 10BaseT cables since both providers are
located at DEC PAIX, along with this customer. "Wall" runs a Squid proxy
in "accelerator mode". "Wall" and "Server" are on an RFC1597 net.

I don't have full routes from both providers at this hour, but that's the
easy part (my own firewall collects full routes from 6 providers now and
does it in 64MB of RAM with some left over, so far.)

"Wall" has to run a DNS server and "Server" has to resolver through it.

"Wall" has to run Sendmail in "proxy to Server" mode, and Server has to
run Sendmail in "Wall is the smart host" mode.

"Wall" uses the "socket" command to make Telnet go straight through to
"Server". "Wall" also acts as an NFS server for "Server" so that they
can share an FTP "/incoming" area for external content updates.

It turns out that Squid's accelerator is observably quicker to come up
with the fancy GIFs this site likes to export, than the real Netscape
Commerce server is. Even though "Server" has quite a lot more computrons
inside of it than "Wall" has.

So don't let's talk any longer about multihoming requiring PI space.
I did this whole thing with an almost-stock BSD/OS 2.1 system (other than
the "socket" command which is off the net from way back.)

(I have no idea why I undertook this project, I've got code to write...)

-- 
miguel a.l. paraz  <map@iphil.net>  http://www.iphil.net/~map/  PGP: 0x43F0D011
iphil communications:  isp/intranet design and implementation, makati city, ph