Continuing our routing-on-hosts discussions, Enno Rey (of the Troopers and IPv6 security fame) made another interesting remark “years ago we were so happy when we finally got rid of gated on Solaris” and I countered with “there are still people who fondly remember the days of running gated on Solaris” because it’s a nice solution to host-to-network multihoming problem.

To set the context: imagine a host connected to two or more network edge devices (example: server connected to two ToR switches) and offering a service that has to be reachable from the outside. How do you make it work?

The correct solution is obvious (in hindsight):

• Assign a different IP address to each interface to get small layer-2 domains (IP subnet is assigned to a single switch) and layer-3 scalability through address summarization;
• Use session layer to establish a mapping between service names and transport/network addresses.

Unfortunately, this solution was deemed religiously incorrect and so TCP/IP stack still doesn’t have a proper session layer.

Some people decided to solve the problem in the application layer. New age solutions use scale-out application architecture where you don’t care about a particular service instance service availability (and subsequently don’t need host-to-network multihoming) because there are always multiple instances of the same service. You could also use a nasty kludge like happy eyeballs and simply try all service endpoints advertised via DNS in parallel.

The traditional way of “solving” this problem was to push it down the stack until it landed in the networking land, and because people writing server operating systems could get link bonding to work with a hub sitting at their desktop (I’m obviously exaggerating but you get the idea) they expected the same behavior from the network regardless of its underlying topology.

End result: VLANs spanning at least two switches, sometimes even whole data centers (to support VM mobility), resulting in expensive and brittle kludges like layer-2 fabrics or multi-chassis link aggregation.

Now imagine you’d use some service advertisement protocol to allow the host to advertise its services even in legacy environments where a service is tied to a fixed IP address.

Actually, we do have the solution for years - the DNS SRV records. Too bad the application and middleware developers never heard about them.

Trying to solve the problem in the network layer, you could invent a whole new protocol to get the job done, or you could use BGP (because it’s widely available and usually works) to advertise server loopback address to the network. You could even go a step further and run the latest version of FRR on the Linux server and use unnumbered physical interfaces with adjacent Cumulus Linux switch for truly scalable plug-and-play networking, like Dinesh Dutt described in the Leaf-and-Spine Fabric Designs webinar.