North American Network Operators Group
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Re: Problem

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Sat Dec 20 17:29:31 2003 
On 20 Dec 2003, at 05:26, pramod babu G wrote:


    What is the difference between Route Server and Route Reflector in
terms of complecity of TCP connections.
Is it that Route Reflectors are for IBGP and Route Server for both EBGP
and IBGP.
The term "route reflector" appears in the standards documents in RFC 1996 and later in RFC2796, both of which are concerned with IBGP things.

"Route server" is (in my experience) almost always used to describe an EBGP thing, usually a means of implementing a multi-lateral peering infrastructure at an exchange point.

"Looking glass" was the term used by Ed Kern in the cgi-script he ran on nitrous which allowed the world at large to execute particular commands on Digex routers. I don't know if other people used the term before Ed did, but that's the first time I saw it.

Some route servers allow public telnet access, and provide looking glass functionality as well as route server functionality. These days, "route server" is frequently used to describe routers which provide looking glass functionality, regardless of whether they propagate routes between peers.

In practice "route reflector" and "route server" are frequently interchanged, and if you are too pedantic in complaining about their misuse people start to hate you (again, in my experience :-)


Joe