We are shooting from the hip while we setup our little WISP, and have run into some trouble communicating my request to our provider. Our connection is not live yet, only running it in the lab.
For this example 1.1.1.1/24 is my ISP and 1.1.1.2/24 is my first address.
They gave us a /24 block and I have been playing with it in the lab. At first I just did a straight /24 subnet and ran proxy-arp to get my public IP’s to the client. I notice a slight latency spike on initial connections. I assumed this to be the proxy-arp.
Then I ran a /30 between my lab gateway 1.1.1.1/30 to 1.1.1.2/30 and static routed the /24 to my 1.1.1.2/30 interface. This eliminated the latency spike I saw on initial connections. I asked my provider if he could do the same on his end and route the /24 block to 1.1.1.2/30, and he right away wanted a ASN. Does this type of setup require BGP?
Or am I phrasing it incorrectly? I only know Mikrotik and they are 100% Cisco. How do I convey this request to my provider? Or is this not a viable request?
You do not need BGP for this, your ISP should know better.
Tell them that you need to bring the /24 inside your network, and that you would like them to route it to you over a different /30 subnet.
If they are a relatively small ISP, they may not want to break out a /30 for the job. In this case, you can use a subnet out of RFC space without issue.
Is it really required that they break out a different /30 to accomplish this. Forgive my ignorance, still fairly new to this. I just know what I can do with the routers in the lab, and I am able to bring the /24 into my network on the same /30. Or is this against a best practice?
Not required, no.. but very typical. If this is a point-to-point connection, the theory goes that it can be unnumbered, but doing it that way makes it hard to troubleshoot.
From wWhat you described, it sounds like the provider is keeping the /24 captive (where the gateway address is actually on their router), which is a valid way to do things, but it limits what you are able to do with the network.