I have 2 boxes connected independantly to two providers with a sangoma T1 card. I have a crossover between the 2 routers which iBGP session is talking over and the 3rd network interface drops down into 2 switches. going to redundant firewalls running carp/pfsync.
We currently use BGP in our office to advertise our /24 network via both providers. We use the "set prepend-self x" to manipulate the incoming bandwidth to try and get as even of a distribution of traffic as we can. Outgoing bandwidth is a little harder to manipulate it seems because it looks to be based on the "better" connected provider. Point is I wanna use both providers links simultaneously and not just wanna have 1 for backup sitting ideally. Well my question is when i take one of the routers down, I seem to suffer reachability problems to certain networks due to BGP convergence issues. At least this is what I believe is the cause of the reachability issues. How do others deal with this? How do I minimize the BGP convergence time as much as possible. In our data center we will be using a private as and BGP because they do not offer an HSRP gateway. This will be an active/backup scenario so I dont think I will any reachibility issues with the BGP convergence time in this enviornment as BGP updates only need to propogate within our providers AS which should happen relatively quickly. Am I correct in this assumption? Unfortuanately, we plan to migrate our data center enviornment to a public AS number when we bring in a 2nd provider. Since any downtime or network reachibility issues will be completely unacceptable in our data center, BGP convergence is a major issue. How do I deal with this? How do others deal with this?
