Daniel Senie writes:
Wrong origination of routing information. I see from comments below you're
looking at the "I'm an end user and want to have multiple paths to the
Internet to get more bandwidth or redundancy" aspect. I run a web hosting
company. We want to be able to have multiple upstream providers and
multihome to guard against outages at any one provider. We pay for
bandwidth based on usage, and so may well have several connections, but
designate one or more to be used only if other connectivity as a last resort.
As the content provider who's spending lots of money on which of MY
circuits I want traffic to arrive on, I don't want you deciding on your two
DSL lines to choose one of my sets of addresses or the other. If you stream
video over a link I don't want used normally, my bills would skyrocket.
This is why I said the decisions in YOUR stack are deciding routing policy
for MY circuits. In the IPv4/BGP world configuration of this stuff isn't
clean or simple, but it is possible to encourage the use of some links over
others. I don't see how I would be able to implement that type of control
with your simplistic SCTP stack tests, other than to play games with
discarding or delaying probe packets from your computer on some paths.
Now wait a minute. It's your bandwidth... shouldn't
you be _shaping_ his traffic if there's some reason
he shouldn't be using one path or another? And thus
provide negative feedback so that he has incentive
to use the path that you want him to use? After all,
the end consumer is likely clueless about your
network and is going to do whatever they can to
get what they're after -- bandwidth. Sounds to
me that if he's able to cause your bills go
through the ceiling _you're_ doing something
wrong.
Mike