Help with a redundant site routing problem (BGP).

[skhoury]

Hello all,

I am fairly new to routing in general, and I have a problem that I need to solve. Any guidance would be much appreciated!

Here is the scenario:

We have our primary site A. This site has our ISP Cisco 2610 router, a PIX 515E FW, and our mail server.

We would like to have a secondary site B. Assuming we will not know any IP addresses at site B...we would like to be able to hot switch into site B, but not have to make a change to any MX record and wait for 48 hours of DNS propagation time.

Does this make sense so far? Now the ISP suggested to me that the BGP protocol could "do" what I am seeking...is this right, and if so, does anyone have any resources or experience with this? I dont know anything about BGP...

Many thanks!

Sam

 

[lgarner]

I'd probably just assign a lower priority MX to the site B server. When the site A server is down, mail will route to it.

 

[skhoury]

What do I do if I dont know the IP addresses at the Site B location?

 

[reliancetech]

What is Site B then, I understand you want to have backup connection..
I can suggest that you can have 2 ISP connections, use priority MX as suggested by lgarner or you can also go for little more complex network with 2 ISPs, 2 PIX boxes, and then Internal routers. configure OSPF - BGP configuration on internal routers and eBGP on external routers. But this is I am assuming that you will have one mail server pointing to differant ISPs.

But you don't know IP address of site B is confusing statement.