Moving away from NAT

I have a few routers (2621s and 1811's) connected to two different ISP's. Both ISP's give me ethernet interfaces to their service. One is a Fibre Optic Link and the other is several ASDL lines. On each of the routers I have configured NAT and static routes to get to the internet with supplied ranges from each ISP.

This works relatively well, however, since we support many clients via VPN connections from our network to theirs, NAT is becoming more of a pain than it's worth.

I do have 2 class C subnets at my disposal which we currently use in-house. We really don't 'need to use' NAT.

I have contacted each ISP and asked what routing protocols they support and both came back with BGP.

I have enough Cisco experience to know that I should take a course on BGP routing. That being said, I'd like to ask the experts here a few questions:

1) Will BGP be the best routing protocol for my type of network? 2) Will the current Cisco course offerings be useful to me? 3) Should I expect to be able to setup routing to both ISPs using my Fibre as primary and 1 or more of the DSL circuits as backup? 4) How well do Cisco IOS routers and Nortel Contivity Switches work together for routing purposes?

If you can't answer all of these questions.. that ok...

Thanks for any input you have!

Mik

yes - since your routing has to co-operate with the ISPs

which one?

what you want is a fairly common requirement, so you should be able to use examples from books or

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to work it out.

If you wantto check out a book, try "Internet Routing Architectures by Halabi (Cisco Press)" or one of the cisco course books such as "Building Scaleable Cisco Internetworks"

yes - the caveat is that both ISPs need to be willing to route to the address blocks you plan to use - ask them.

not done it in anger, and you might need to make the cisco translate between routing protocols using redistribute, but should be OK. FWIW both will interoperate with the ex Bay Network / Wellfleet routers also supplied by Nortel.