Policy-based routing is evil? Discuss.

[William Waites <wwaites () tardis ed ac uk>]

I'm having a discussion with a small network in a part of the world
where bandwidth is scarce and multiple DSL lines are often used for
upstream links. The topic is policy-based routing, which is being
described as "load balancing" where end-user traffic is assigned to a
line according to source address.

In my opinion the main problems with this are:

  - It's brittle, when a line fails, traffic doesn't re-route
  - None of the usual debugging tools work properly
  - Adding a new user is complicated because it has to be done in (at
    least) two places

But I'm having a distinct lack of success locating rants and diatribes
or even well-reasoned articles supporting this opinion.

Am I out to lunch?

-w
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

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