Harry was a television drama series made by Union Pictures for the BBC, and shown on BBC One between 1993 and 1995. The programme concerned a journalist called Harry Salter (played by Michael Elphick) who ran a news agency in the town of Darlington, County Durham, in England.
Feature Overview
When a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) speaking router with no local policy configured receives multiple network layer reachability information (NLRI) from the internal BGP (iBGP) for the same destination, the router will choose one iBGP path as the best path. The best path is then installed in the IP routing table of the router. For example, in Figure 1, although there are three paths to autonomous system 200, Router 2 determines that one of the paths to autonomous system 200 is the best path and uses this path only to reach autonomous system 200.
Figure 1 Non-MPLS Topology with One Best Path
The iBGP Multipath Load Sharing feature enables the BGP speaking router to select multiple iBGP paths as the best paths to a destination. The best paths or multipaths are then installed in the IP routing table of the router. For example, on router 2 in Figure 2, the paths to routers 3, 4, and 5 are configured as multipaths and can be used to reach autonomous system 200, thereby equally sharing the load to autonomous system 200.
Figure 2 Non-MPLS Topology with Three Multipaths
The iBGP Multipath Load Sharing feature functions similarly in a Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Virtual Private Network (VPN) with a service provider backbone. For example, on router PE1 in Figure 3, the paths to routers PE2, PE3, and PE4 can be selected as multipaths and can be used to equally share the load to site 2.
Figure 3 MPLS VPN with Three Multipaths
For multiple paths to the same destination to be considered as multipaths, the following criteria must be met:
•All attributes must be the same. The attributes include weight, local preference, autonomous system path (entire attribute and not just length), origin code, Multi Exit Discriminator (MED), and Interior Gateway Protocol (IGP) distance.
•The next hop router for each multipath must be different.
Even if the criteria are met and multiple paths are considered multipaths, the BGP speaking router will still designate one of the multipaths as the best path and advertise this best path to its neighbors.
an extract from wot i am reading for work tomorrow *yawn*