T3's are nice if you can afford them, and that's really the deciding factor, cost. You haven't mentioned any layer 1/2 soultions, i.e. muxing 2 or more T1's together. Most ISPs support that, and it's transparent to the layer 3 setup. You do tend to halve your MTBF when you mux two T1s, so make sure the muxing arrangement you make can deal with one of them going out. Also, it forces you to use only 1 ISP, which might be bad if you were hoping to get some redundancy that way. Other ways (which you've mentioned) are to use seperate T1s for seperate purposes.. I did that for a while. My "incoming traffic" such as people hitting my web sites and sending me mail came in one pipe, by virtue of the fact that I had a seperate IP range on it. The other pipe was for my users to "surf." Different ISPs, different address ranges, no problem. The problems are fairly obvious.. when one pipe goes over, I can't take advantage of spare bandwidth on the other. When I lose one pipe, I lose it's function, because it typically takes to long to switch routes. It may be viable to switch routes if you stick with one ISP, and both pipes go to the same or nearby POPs. I got rid of that soultion because I got T3's. I don't really have the experiece to speak to BGP routing solutons. Ryan I'm working with a company currently using a T1 which becomes very sluggish when engineers do many FTP and HTTP sessions through a state firewall on a Netra-1 (firewall is not a bottleneck). They're thinking of upgrading to a T3 with a fast proxy server (+ VPN) since they also are running out of IPs, and internal systems are getting hit by external packets. My knee-jerk reaction is to use a very fast CPU system (600MHz Alpha) and Altavista FW with 100Mbps cards. webservers | Internet--(T3)---R1---FW---+----R2----Internal LAN VPN Tunnel Svr I'm wondering about alternatives to the situation, one is multiple T1s coming into a set of BGP net for redundancy, and to partition FTP/HTTP proxies on one server, and remaining traffic on a second server (allowing future cluster or fail-over via scripts and IP failover of secondaries). Although this actually may be cheaper, faster and more reliable, but it's more complex, and harder for the company to fix if it dies (fails into a degraded mode). Also most local traffic may route through a single T1, and they may inadvertantly become an Internet eXchange. Internet | | | (n+1 T1s) | | | Cisco 2500s | | | Hub/switch | | FW-A FW-B FW-A could be used for outbound client system access, and FW-B could be used for inbound/server protocols (VPN, webserver SQL, NTP, SMTP, DNS, etc). A dual-subnet webfarm could connect to third interface on both. Hmm, too complex maybe. Opinions? Bill Stout Received: from tunnel.sybase.com ([130.214.231.88]) by ibwest.sybase.com (Lotus SMTP MTA v4.6.1 (569.2 2-6-1998)) with SMTP id 88256613.001879A7; Thu, 28 May 1998 21:27:20 -0700 Received: from smtp1.sybase.com (smtp1 [130.214.220.35]) by tunnel.sybase.com (8.8.4/8.8.4) with SMTP id VAA23805; Thu, 28 May 1998 21:25:24 -0700 (PDT) Received: from inergen.sybase.com by smtp1.sybase.com (4.1/SMI-4.1/SybH3.5-030896) id AA17450; Thu, 28 May 98 21:25:23 PDT Received: from nfr.net (tower.nfr.net [208.196.145.10]) by inergen.sybase.com (8.8.4/8.8.4) with ESMTP id VAA15911; Thu, 28 May 1998 21:26:48 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from lists@localhost) by nfr.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) id QAA18326 for firewall-wizards-outgoing; Thu, 28 May 1998 16:11:04 -0500 (CDT) Received: (from fwiz@localhost) by nfr.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) id QAA18294 for firewall-wizardsat_private; Thu, 28 May 1998 16:10:55 -0500 (CDT) Received: from pse02.pios.com (pse02.pios.com [199.33.129.3]) by nfr.net (8.8.8/8.8.8) with SMTP id NAA15811 for <firewall-wizardsat_private>; Tue, 26 May 1998 13:03:13 -0500 (CDT) Received: by pse02.pios.com; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA26111; Tue, 26 May 1998 14:05:51 -0400 Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 14:06:42 -0400 From: "Stout, Bill" <StoutB@pioneer-standard.com> Subject: Speeds and feeds To: Firewall-wizards <firewall-wizardsat_private> Message-Id: <33C5AB9085E1D1119AB90000F89CBC7E1B152Aat_private> Mime-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.1960.3) Content-Type: text/plain Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Sender: owner-firewall-wizardsat_private Precedence: bulk Reply-To: "Stout, Bill" <StoutB@pioneer-standard.com>
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