Connectinting to two ISP's

[t.harness]

Currently we have connections to MCI and to Qwest for Internet connectivity. We use strictly the MCI 6mb circuit for the Internet and we have the Qwest circuit for backup. I am running HSRP on two 7200 routers and all traffic comes through a pair of Pix to get to them to go to the Internet. On the PIX you can only set up one default route. Right now that works ok because I have the HSRP address that fails over to the backup when needed. The thing is though, that I want to change it to where we use both circuits and load balance between them. I am stuck on figuring out how to do this in my set up. Has anyone done this and can gice me some advice on the best way to do it.

Tim

[Craig Norborg]

First switch to using BGP to each of your providers. Then set up some routing protocol between your two 7200 series routers (iBGP, EIGRP, OSPF). You might be able to run OSPF to the PIX, but your probably better of continuing using a default route with HSRP still.

Then, if one router is the HSRP master, but the router going through the other link is "better", it will forward the traffic across the LAN to the other router before it hits the internet. You might want to have HSRP watch the interface on each router and decrement the priority if the interface goes down without the router going down. Take care in making sure that whatever router has your most heavily used connection is the primary with HSRP.

Also make sure that you have route-caching on the FastEthernet interfaces of your routers enabled. Esp. "ip route-cache same-interface".