How to split uncapped and unshaped traffic?

[Neo_X]

Hi guys

I hope there is someone out there that can solve this "riddle" for us.
As we all know, uncapped solutions have been provided by various ISP's, but where they fail, is that severe policing is applied to these accounts causing torrents, downloads, and in some cases multiplayer gaming to suffer. I know Afrihost etc doesn't do this yet, but give it a while.

I currently have a "uncapped" acount, which i want to dedicate for downloading, and then an "capped/unshaped" account, which i want to dedicate for gaming(combination of local and international)

Since both accounts needs access to international traffic ( some of the games i play is international, and the downloads is using an international USENET server astraweb), i will not be able to use the already developed applications like routesentry/linksys as they have been designed around splitting local and international.

I thought about adding static routing on my windows machine, splitting the traffic to the correct gateway, but it failed when i discovered that the news server ( news.astraweb.com) doesnt resolve to the same ip-address every time. They are probably using a server farm to be able to cope with the huge amount of global clients they have.
This means adding a static route towards the "download" gateway will fail, as some ip's will still pass through the default/capped gateway which will cause my unshaped 2GB to go poof very quickly


I am not sure if i am able to add static routing referring to a hostname in stead of a gateway, but that seems to be the only solution i can think off.

Is there any applications/boxes out there that will simplify splitting traffic at this level?

thank you for your help

Neo_X

 

[froot]

The only thing you can do to split this is using the same concept as with local/intl splitting - check what the IPs are that you connect to for your gaming/etc needs and add this to a list and then route those IPs through your unshaped account. Whatever remains should go through your uncapped account.
With regards to your problem with news.astraweb.com, have you tried to add it on a hostname basis?

 

[Paul_S]

One solution:

1. Linux router
2. Set up the two PPPoE connections
3. Route the traffic based on port numbers instead of IP addresses (most games use specific ranges of ports)

http://lartc.org

 

[Neo_X]

The only thing you can do to split this is using the same concept as with local/intl splitting - check what the IPs are that you connect to for your gaming/etc needs and add this to a list and then route those IPs through your unshaped account. Whatever remains should go through your uncapped account.
With regards to your problem with news.astraweb.com, have you tried to add it on a hostname basis?

Tried adding now:
C:\>route add news.astraweb.com mask 255.255.255.255 192.168.1.20 -p
The route addition failed: The parameter is incorrect.

One solution:

1. Linux router
2. Set up the two PPPoE connections
3. Route the traffic based on port numbers instead of IP addresses (most games use specific ranges of ports)

http://lartc.org

Sounds interesting. Maybe i can try looking into Virtual machines rather. Quads/ I7 have so much spare power lying around, so a simple linux "gateway" shouldn't draw to much power.
But yes. Port based routing seems to be the solution. I have tinkered with IpCop a while ago. will go read a bit when i get time.
Thx for pointing me in the linux direction

 

[Pada]

You can't add a route by specifying a hostname. Unfortunately routing tables work on static IP addresses and not on hostnames!

Since you have a Core i7, you should be able to run a copy of RouterOS in a Virtual Machine to do the traffic splitting according to the port number (since Windows can't do that).
If you don't want to spend money on buying RouterOS, then you could install pretty much any Linux distro (eg Ubuntu / Fedora Core) to do the traffic splitting. Of course it would be better to install only the minimum files required and not a complete GUI to do the routing.

I got my RouterOS v4 license for roughly R220 from http://www.mikrotik-routeros.net/