autofailover with demand dial routing questions

[dennylester]

Hello all,

We have 14 sites connected via frame relay in a hub-spoke setup. We are now looking into auto failover using ISDN lines.

We are considering buying a Cisco 2811 with a VWIC2-2MFT-t1/e1 card and a NM-8B-U card.

I assume this 2811 can perform the auto failover function and grab one of these 8 ISDN lines for backup purposes.

My question is, half of our remote sites are running Cisco 1720 routers and the other half are running Compatible Systems 2200R routers. I assume the Cisco 1720 routers will have no problems with auto failover, but need to know if the Compatible Systems routers will work or do we need to replace them?

Thank you,

Denny

[Richard Burts]

Denny

I am not familiar with the Compatible Systems 2200R routers. So there are some things that you can help me understand. Are you running any dynamic routing protocol between the hub router and the spoke routers? If there is a dynamic routing protocol you should be able to use floating static routes on the hub router to bring up the ISDN and define an alternate path to the remote. Is there any similar facility on the Compatible Systems router?

Another alternative available on the Cisco if you run OSPF as the routing protocol would be to configure the ISDN as a Demand Circuit with cost assigned to make it less favorable than the Frame Relay. Does the Compatible Systems router support OSPF Demand Circuit?

HTH

Rick

[dennylester]

Hello,

Thank you for responding to me. At the moment our entire network uses static routes, but I'm not opposed to changing to RIP2.

Compatible Systems was bought out by Cisco several years ago and shutdown. Other than the basic configurations, I'm not sure what these routers can do well. I know they support RIP and RIP2, and the last available OS has an implementation of OSPF, but I don't know how well it's implemented.

I know we can dial in and authenticate using PAP and/or CHAP. At the moment when a site goes down we use an Window 2003 RAS server to dial into the remote site and manually change the routes to route through this server. It works okay most of the time but is a lousy solution.

I would like the Cisco hub to initiate all the connections.

So, if the Cisco hub dials into the Compatible Systems router, does it seem reasonable that the routes would be learned via RIP and it would work?

If yes for the above, how would the Cisco hub be notified that the frame circuit is back up and to disconnect the ISDN line..

Sorry for all the questions, demand dialing routing is new for me..

[bhatia.sachin · Accepted solution]

im sending 2 links to you for the above scenario.I hope ull be able to pick an deploy the best one according to your requirement.

http://www.cisco.com/warp/public/125/fr_isdn_backup.pdf

http://www.networkingunlimited.com/white004.html

[dennylester]

Thank you for getting back to me.

If my understanding of these links is correct, this is exactly what I was looking for.

Thank you much,

Denny Lester