David W. Hankins wrote:
What most people do of course is VRRP.
I agree, and I have done this in the past. However, I am very happy with the support of IPv6 to do away with requiring VRRP.
Barring that, you just specify multiple default routers, and the client will select the router that still responds to ARP. But support for this is not universal, so.
Always a problem, though arp doesn't timeout when a end node disappears in a reasonable fashion.
When that isn't available, what I have done in the past here is to use the DHCP server to give out a default router option that is sorted according to the DHCP relay agent that was used to reach the server (keyed on giaddr contents).
This is a nice method as well, though limited by the half life of the DHCP lease. It also doesn't address the fact that you might be handing out IP addresses from *both* DHCP relay agents with cross redundancy for gateways.
No need to take on 'routed -q' in the client, it can stay a simple dumb host, with all configuration complexity in the DHCP server or negotiated in HA by the routers.
Dumb hosts is exactly what makes life infuriating. I want smart hosts. The network should be relatively dumb. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but the premise of IP was that hosts are smart and networks are dumb. Then we started making smart networks to break things.
I want built in multiple IP bindings on my hosts. I'd like (Windows 7 without having to call netsh, perhaps?) support for static and dynamic addresses (privacy extensions are beautiful). I especially want support for multiple dynamic addresses with communication to the host that it should start using a newer address for future requests, yet finish up what it's doing with the old address before unbonding it.
Please don't get me wrong. I don't run a corporate network. I have my own little server farm and I have support to edge customers. What customer's do with the prefixes I give them is up to them. DHCP/SLAAC, it's all good. I'd rather not run DHCP for my servers or my little helpdesk network. On a standard ISP edge, I expect to see hybrid solutions; depending on the layout.
Jack
