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Thursday, April 28, 2011

How many Static routes are too many

Recently in my new position I have started to work in the small medium business arena. One of the biggest challenges in coming from the enterprise environment is the lack of routing protocols. Some of it is due to knowledge of the internal IT staff, some of it is due to the VAR's that provide service, and other times its politics. This shouldn't seem like a big deal, but I get a few calls every week of something that isn't reachable in some way shape or form. 99 percent of the time when the routing was updated someone forgot to save the changes then "power" happens and routes are lost. This customer in particular has 3 sites over MPLS VPN, and a few more sites that come in site to site VPN's over ASA's. When I pull the configs for the devices I see pages of static routes to get to locations. I have asked them several times why don't they run OSPF or EIGRP, and they always say "we like things with static routes". Well if you like them you shouldn't call me ever few weeks cause you can't get somewhere. So how do we fix these problems. We usually just go right up the OSI model. Start with the device that can't talk to the far end, trace route to where it gets suck and check the control and data plane's on that device. All and all this doesn't seem to be a big deal, but at times it can take hours when firewalls, and DMZ's and undocumented configs are into play. This brings me back to my point OSPF, EIGRP will detect link failure quickly and the packets will either find a way or if syslog is setup correctly we will get alerts of link failure. This is just another rant of the day in the life of a network engineer.

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