2 Account Traffic Splitting (Int/Int)

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AnthIste

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Hey guys

My dad sort of freaked when he found out we're capped today. I saw it coming but he didnt know, and its been happening far too often. I've tried smoothing things over by telling him I'll make a plan and sort it out so thats sort of what I'm doing here.

We currently have a 3GB cap 4mb line from telkom but we recently got upgraded to 5GB which was pretty nice of them. I have 30GB local when the blended runs out, so getting capped doesnt bother me as much as it bothers him because he needs the blended for work.

My plan was to downgrade our account to a 2GB and get another 1GB account, then split the traffic so that I can pace through the 2GB as fast as I want and then when that gets capped, my dad is still happily chugging away at his 1GB. Is this even possible?

I don't know too much about networking / routing etc but from what I gather, the difference between bridge mode and standard (routing?) mode is that in the standard mode, the router dials up the connection with your ISP or whatever, and in bridged mode you do the dialing from your PC. Is this correct? Does this mean that on each PC I can set up a different connection to dial into the correct adsl account (Router in bridge mode)?

Any help will be greatly appreciated
 
that is essentially the case. i dont exactly know all the details myself. i actually asked this exact question in the adsl isp discussions. there have been answeres to this question. check it out.
 
The Philosopher said:
that is essentially the case. i dont exactly know all the details myself. i actually asked this exact question in the adsl isp discussions. there have been answeres to this question. check it out.
Click to expand...

Thanks man, do you by any chance VAGUELY remember the topic title so I can do a search? Il go looking, but most 'splitting' topics cover local/blended splitting with routesentry or the like, so searching is gonna be tricky
 
What you actually want is a router in half-bridge mode (referred to as supporting PPPoE passthrough or PPPoE relaying). Its a combination of bridging & routing: the router is dialing 1 account AND you are still able to dial additional accounts from other PC's that are connected to the router's LAN/WiFi.

Me and my friends are sharing a blended account, and if the international cap runs out, we simply buy/topup another international account that we place on the router. We then put the blended account (now only local cap left) on another router, that does the traffic splitting for international & local traffic.

We then set the 2nd router as our default gateway, and then the traffic is automatically split over the 2 accounts, with international going through the ADSL router's connection and local going through the 2nd router's PPPoE connection :D That way we can still download loads of local stuff, without using any international cap.

If you don't want to do traffic splitting for everyone, then you can simply leave out the 2nd router and run something like RouteSentry OR my Traffic Splitter app to do the traffic splitting for a single PC.
Alternatively, you could run a VPN on that PC that's doing the traffic splitting OR you could setup ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) to let your PC act as a gateway/2nd router, which would then allow other PC's on the network to make use of the traffic splitting too.

You can find a few different ways of doing this kind of traffic splitting in my signature.
 
Make your dad's day and get a 5GB account from Afrihost (R145) for him. You keep the 3GB account. You don't need to get a separate line. All you do is put your router in bridge mode and create the accounts for the ISPs on your computers. Then you dial each as it's needed. Post your router and OS in The Philosopher's thread and someone will be along shortly with detailed instructions. I'm going over there now to put something generic together as I don't know your specs.

Here is the thread in question: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?p=3523204#post3523204
 
Kaufies said:
Make your dad's day and get a 5GB account from Afrihost (R145) for him. You keep the 3GB account. You don't need to get a separate line. All you do is put your router in bridge mode and create the accounts for the ISPs on your computers. Then you dial each as it's needed. Post your router and OS in The Philosopher's thread and someone will be along shortly with detailed instructions. I'm going over there now to put something generic together as I don't know your specs.

Here is the thread in question: http://mybroadband.co.za/vb/showthread.php?p=3523204#post3523204
Click to expand...

+1 Pretty much thats all you need to do.

How many PC's do you have ?

Lets say its just you and your dad on seperate pc's, your pc will dial in to local only and his will dial in to international.
 
Wow thanks for the detailed reply Pada :) and everyone else too actually. I have a ZyXEL, not sure about the exact model, but it doesnt seem to support half-bridge mode :(. There will be a maximum of 4 PC's using the internet (even less until we sort out our networking) so it won't be too much of a problem for me to just use bridge mode and set up each computer to dial up to the respective account. Il do a bit of reading on bridge mode though.

Pada: I thought routesentry / traffic splitter were used to split traffic on one computer, not between 2+ computers?

Off topic: Great work on that app :O its starting to inspire me to make something useful/functional for a change. I might try start a simple nzb downloader sometime
 
AnthIste, RouteSentry/ my Traffic Splitter app is actually meant for splitting traffic on a single PC, however nothing is stopping you to use that PC as a gateway with either ICS or a VPN. Unfortunately ICS can only share 1 connection, which is why your router has to be in half-bridge mode.

If you are running Linux, then you can easily setup your PC as a proper gateway that can "share" more than just 2 connections and ofcourse doing the splitting too.

Another thing which is becoming quite popular, is people running Router OS in a virtual machine. The free/demo license only supports 1 NAT rule, implying that you can only "share" 1 connection. The level 4 license costs as much as a MikroTik RB750 that comes with the Level 4 license... :( So its definitely worth it to get the RB750 if you want to do traffic splitting...

Off Topic: I've written a php script to automatically search nzbmatrix.com for the stuff that I want. If it found it, it then downloads the zipped .nzb file, extract it and append it to alt.binz's download queue. The script runs like once every 15 minutes, so I don't have to go and search for stuff any more :D
 
AnthIste, RouteSentry/ my Traffic Splitter app is actually meant for splitting traffic on a single PC, however nothing is stopping you to use that PC as a gateway with either ICS or a VPN. Unfortunately ICS can only share 1 connection, which is why your router has to be in half-bridge mode.
Click to expand...

Oooh now I get it :) oops. I have an old laptop with linux installed that I can maybe use, but I'd prefer not using a PC as a dedicated gateway / splitter. A linux machine can do some pretty advanced networking right? With iptables iirc? Also how would you go about managing a gateway pc? Telkom Line > Router > Gateway > Split Traffic > Hub > All PC's?

Another thing which is becoming quite popular, is people running Router OS in a virtual machine. The free/demo license only supports 1 NAT rule, implying that you can only "share" 1 connection. The level 4 license costs as much as a MikroTik RB750 that comes with the Level 4 license... So its definitely worth it to get the RB750 if you want to do traffic splitting...
Click to expand...

Installing all the cabling is going to be expensive enough :( so until we become rich again, that wont work :(

Just to sort of sum things up: Bridge mode + Individual dialing WILL work, but splitting the traffic is easier to manage and will work as well?

Off topic: Wow thats pretty impressive :) now just convert it to a 5kb uber lightweight asm program ;) should be challenging, seeing as thats an excellent job for a scripting language compared to.. um.. asm :P
EDIT: seeing as you just delegate the actual downloading to alt.binz, you're not actually familiar with the nzb format and the news protocol right?
 
AnthIste said:
A linux machine can do some pretty advanced networking right? With iptables iirc? Also how would you go about managing a gateway pc? Telkom Line > Router > Gateway > Split Traffic > Hub > All PC's?
Click to expand...
Yes, that is how it would be done.
You could also connect both the gateway PC and the other PC's to the ADSL router's switch, and it would still split the traffic correctly - thus no extra switches are required. The only thing that you have to remember in this case is to disable DHCP on the ADSL router, otherwise you'll have 2 DHCP servers running.

AnthIste said:
Just to sort of sum things up: Bridge mode + Individual dialing WILL work, but splitting the traffic is easier to manage and will work as well?
Click to expand...
bridge mode + individual dialing is the simplest way that you'll get. The downside is that everyone has to run a script/app to do the traffic splitting themselves.
This method won't work with most uncapped accounts, since they only allow 1 concurrent connection. This means that only one PC/router would be able to dial that account!
I prefer to have the traffic splitting done on one PC, since its easier to manage. Like my dad and most of my friends understand the idea, but they have no clue on how to manage it, which is why we are using a gateway configuration to do the splitting.

Edit:
AnthIste said:
Off topic: Wow thats pretty impressive :) now just convert it to a 5kb uber lightweight asm program ;) should be challenging, seeing as thats an excellent job for a scripting language compared to.. um.. asm :P
EDIT: seeing as you just delegate the actual downloading to alt.binz, you're not actually familiar with the nzb format and the news protocol right?
Click to expand...
No, I'm not familiar with the NZB/News host protocol, but I have a faint idea of how its working though. I don't care about the protocol - as long as my script is running and the files are downloading I'm happy.
 
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Ok cool its time to go messing with some internet connections :). Being capped doesnt help much though because I'd like to do some broader research into the how's and why's rather than following a guide only. That will also help a lot of something stops working. Im sure you understand it all pretty well seeing as you made an app to successfully manipulate the traffic :)

And the most complicated thing I've made so far by reading documentation is a Chip-8 emulator which still doesnt work 100% :P so I hope the news server protocol isnt too hard to understand. Who knows, maybe theres even a library to do it all for you like some of the http libs that are available. I think it'l be worth it though. Loading a chip-8 ROM and seeing 'TRON' written on the screen gave me such a lovely fuzzy feeling inside :D
 
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