Re: how to aggregate internet lines

"LookingForward" <petrenko@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1135974389.810723.15540@g43g2000cwa.googlegroups.com...
>
> Somebody. wrote:
>
>> He's talking about using mulitple smaller lines to approximate one bigger
>> line, so he wants to do something more like bonding. Round Robin DNS
>> will
>> balance incoming traffic only, and even then only approximately.
>>
>> Along the same lines with a high end soho box you could source route to
>> spread traffic over two links, but that's a very weak form of load
>> balancing.
>>
>> If he thinks he's going to get 6Mbps downloads with four 1.5Mbps lines,
>> it's
>> just not going to happen.
>>
>> -Russ.
>
> Yes, I have 4x 8Mbps lines and about 20 workstations with users who use
> A LOT of bandwith.
> Right now I have to keep changing gateways for them if someone need
> more dedicated bandwith. Usually someone starts screeming that he has
> important client on the demo and someone is using all internet on his
> line. Then I have to figure out who else is set to that gateway and
> move them somewhere else.
> I would like to plug all those lines into one box and set policies in
> it who can use how much bandwith.
>
> Thank you for all responses!

Truthfully you need a *real* load balancer to do that properly. Not cheap.
F5 is one of the premier vendors of such boxes. Maybe you can find a used
one on the old (pre version 9) chipsets for a reasonable cost.

http://www.f5.com

At very least, with a reasonable router that does source routing like a
Fortigate, you could redirect the workstation from the router rather than
messing with their gateway. A less maintenance-prone approach might be to
additionally prioritize and/or rate shape their traffic to ensure that the
important stuff gets through -- arriving at a workable if not perfect
solution most of the time. With only 20 workstations and only so many types
of traffic you could probably dream up a scheme to do it -- source routing
means you can route based on source IP *or* protocol, so you could send,
say, all the web out one feed, and half the workstations ftp out feed 2, the
other half out feed 3, but video conference gets 4MB guaranteed on feed 1,
and voip gets high priority over all the rest of the spillover on feed 4...
that sort of thing... The important stuff gets through, less important has
to wait or share smaller chunks of particular lines...

-Russ.
Received on Tue Jan 3 03:40:15 2006