Nyarly's Journal: A brief aside

This has nothing at all to do with Theory of Computation. I just learned something new, and I'm terribly impressed and amazed at how simple and correct the right answer can be sometime. I'm also thoroughly digusted at how much a complete geek I've actually become.

HSRP. Hot Standby Router Protocol. This is not only how all networking should be, it's how everything should be.

Keeping in the pedantic theme of this journal, I'll aside for a quick explaination. Two or more routers need to back up for each other. But, since they're the default router for all sorts of not very advanced nodes, they need to do this is a very clever way. There's no way you're going to go into every Wintel box on your network and somehow get them to understand that two routers are their default. Not that it can't be done, but it's a real pain. And actually, sometimes it can't be done. Besides, every right thinking person agrees that if at all possible, a thing should be done once and no more.

So, what HSRP is, see, is this agreement between the routers, that they'll all pretend to be one router, with one of them being the active router. But if the main one goes down, three seconds later another router in the group can take over, and the hosts using that router are clueless.

Such simplicity. So neatly orchestrated. This is why people pay Cisco the big bucks.