Affordably Aggregating ISP Connections? 180
An anonymous reader writes "Has anyone setup a system to aggregate multiple ISP connections to form a high bandwidth site-to-site link? Load Sharing SCTP looked interesting, but it doesn't look like it has been widely adopted. Multi-Link PPP appears to be more widely supported for clients, but I can't find any good guides for setting up both sides of the connection for a site-to-site link. The hardware solutions I've found are expensive for a small business. Does anyone have experience using hardware solutions from Mushroom Networks (Virtual Leased Line, p2 of this document), Ecessa (site-to-Site Channel Bonding), or others?"
Re:Peering (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that the poster was intending to agreggate a cable, DSL, and satellite link to make a more reliable connection, not get multiple ISPs on one line.
What are you really trying to do? (Score:5, Insightful)
What you have presented us with here is a "B C" problem. You want to achieve C, so you ask us how to do B. Unfortunately, you never specify what A is, so the best we can do is give you some pointers for B which are probably going to be irrelevant and useless to what you are really trying to achieve.
Most of the comments will probably be about trying to figure out what your A problem is. To that end, why don't you just get a faster line in the first place and forget about this line aggregation stuff you're asking about?
Re:Don't be so cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
All of them?
Um, yeah: Whatever you say, kid.
We usually just use a Roadrunner account for the main office, just like all the other small business out there. It's faster and cheaper than a T1, and has better reliability than the PRI that handles our phones. (We also have a freebie account with a local WISP that we do some business with for manual fail-over, but we haven't had to use it in years.)
Re:pfSense (Score:2, Insightful)
I use pfSense too for my multi wan needs and it really is a wonderful distro imho.
However, there is a difference between grabbing a bunch of wans and throwing them together vs linking them together like one giant pipe. I'm not completely sure what the author is trying to do but if this person wants the multi lane freeway approach instead of multiple separate parallel roads than pfSense does not currently support protocols such as mlppp and may not be what they are looking for.
However, if the person wants to hack it a bit then theoretically it could be done since pfSense is built on freebsd (i believe) which does support mlppp. However, one might ask why do that when you could install freebsd on the box instead of pfSense and do the same thing with the same amount of work?
Dreytek (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You can't do what you want to do (Score:3, Insightful)
Need More Infos (Score:2, Insightful)
Sounds like you're trying to take a DSL, cable, and possibly a T1 or other technology and trunk them for combined throughput. That isn't possible because you'd have packets in the same stream taking different routes and TCP/IP doesn't allow for that, that I know of. I don't think any technology allows for that. For example an 8mbit DSL, 6mbit cable, and a T1 can't be combined to make a 15.5mbit connection. I suppose the same would be true if you were wirelessly connected to multiple networks.
You can, however, use all three gateways independently with a variety of load balancing software so that when a new request is made from any host it is routed through the gateway with both the quickest response time and the most bandwidth available. I'll let you look that up on your own - there are lots of free options. The problem is that the load balancer needs to be smart enough to not fuck up your active sessions. If you were communicating with a host via one route, went idle for a bit but didn't end the session, then sent more data via another route the host on the other end will most likely (if written correctly) not accept your new packets.
The way we handled it at "The Geek House" with three internet gateways was to just permanently assign gateways based on the role of the host, and made sure not too many were on the slower gateways. It's not perfect, and certainly could have been geekier, but it worked and we didn't have to worry about shit breaking in the middle of a frag fest. And if one gateway was down the hosts configured with that gateway just had to change their gateway.
Re:What are you really trying to do? (Score:3, Insightful)
As the other poster noted, it's not always easy to just add more bandwidth. Where I live, the absolute fastest DSL line I can get is 1.5 Mbps. Fortunately, my cable company offers faster options, up to 22 Mbps. If they didn't, I'd be screwed if I actually wanted a decent connection relatively cheaply.
Also, one nice thing about having multiple links over multiple ISPs multiplexed together is that you have redundant links. If one ISP is having problems, you still have some bandwidth, which is generally better than no bandwidth at all. I'm assuming that the submitter would like features like automatic failover, so that if one link goes down, all of the traffic will defer to the other link until it comes back up.
Where I work, we have this type of setup with most of our big plant sites, although with the bandwidth we're talking about, it's definitely high-end business-class (read: expensive as hell) service, and because we don't want sites to become dependent on the higher bandwidth, we leave our secondary circuits idle unless needed. It would be nice for there to be a solution that offers the higher bandwidth and redundancy of a multiplexed connection cheaper than it would cost to only be available to huge MNCs.
Re:tomato (Score:1, Insightful)
im curious what happens with sessions on web sites and such that look at your IP address...
do you constantly have to re-login to such sites?