WAN routing Question

[mimom]

Our company has two T1 lines. What we would like to do is have all primary Internet connections pass through one of the T1 lines. The other T1 line only needs to be used to route data through when a specific destination needs to be reached. How would I do this? What kind of router is best for this job?

[james.feger]

Send all internet traffic through your primary connection via your normal method (static route, bgp, whatever), then use more specific static routes for the individual destinations for the second T1.

[mimom]

If I use a static route such that all traffic is forwarded to my ISP's router such as ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0.0 172.16.100.2 then add an additional static route for the second T1, are there any draw backs in doing this if I am not using BGP? Will adding static routes for the second T1 line slow things down or cause network traffic to be unstable if I am not using BGP?

[james.feger]

You shoould not see any problems. BGP is more process heavy than static routing usually. If you do a default route (o.o.o.o/o) for your primary T1, then add the individual statics for your second t1, you should be fine. Like I said, with static routing, you have less decision making going on for the router, and do not have a huge memory hog full of a BGP routing table. Don't get me wrong, BGP is the way to go, but it sounds like you will be just fine with statics.