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Re: [LUG] sharing lines.

 

David Johnson wrote:
>
> There are two options that I know of:
> 1. Put a router (or a Linux PC) in front of the existing ADSL routers and do 
> load balancing

Alternatively if you have a network connected to both routers (WIFI
should do if the routers play nicely with each other), one can assign
multiple routes to clients for fail over from one to the other. Assuming
both routers do NAT the traffic will just come back the route it went.

One can route different traffic different ways as well with Linux
clients fairly easily in such a network. Effectively making the clients
into the router David mentioned - no idea if Windows clients can do this
sort of thing - probably but I wouldn't like to try with Windows.

When I was pondering this for moderate sized wireless networks with
random clients, we came to the conclusion that web traffic was generally
the biggy (since we would handle the SMTP outgoing in most cases), and
that Linux boxes running Squid at the main exit points was probably the
simplest way of sharing the bandwidth. Since you can transparently proxy
the HTTP traffic, and then let the squid boxes talk to each other (as
well as the Internet - we were assuming many more than two exit points).
So all the brains on network cleverness was in the Squid boxes
(including the DHCP configuration). This also had the potential for
using bandwidth from multiple connections for fetching content for one
web browser to the maximum, which was really the goal of that project,
although it didn't necessarily share that bandwidth nicely between clients.

There is a lot written about ways of doing this, but at the time I
lasted looked the more esoteric ways all looked a tad hairy (read
probably would work for a while if you had time to deploy them, but not
the kind of thing to live with).

Any solution over a couple of routing commands in a Linux client is
probably overkill. Trying to load balance across the connections would
be nice, but I'm guessing more effort than it is worth, especially if
one of the connections has more bandwidth than the other.

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