Re: multihomed host

[Iljitsch van Beijnum <iljitsch@muada.com>]

On 10 Oct 2002, William Waites wrote:

>     Bill> For what  it's worth, I've occasionally heard  the term used
>     Bill> in  an application-layer  context to  refer to  hosts having
>     Bill> multiple  IP addresses rather  than/in addition  to multiple
>     Bill> interfaces.

> This  just  looks like  the  degenerate  case  -- multiple  addresses,
> multiple  interfaces,  except that  each  of  the multiple  interfaces
> happen to  be the  same. It seems  to me  that the network  layer code
> should treat both cases identically. Does this make sense?

There is one difference that may be important sometimes, but
inconsequential at other times: a host can detect that an interface is
down. It can't necessarily detect the link to an ISP is down.