Charlie.
Well-Known Member
The story: International bandwidth costs ~~ R 70.00 per GB. Local costs ~~ R 19.00. If your router is configured to connect to an international account, traffic to local IPs wastes expensive bandwidth.
Hypothetical Situation: you want to download a whole bunch of Linux-related files from a local mirror. Instead of wasting int'l bandwidth, you temporarily configure your router to connect to a local account. This saves you money but prevents you from browsing, internationally, for the duration of the download.
Enter the requirement for a home-network that sports "Least-Cost Routing".
Basic idea: some piece of routing software uses knowledge of the South African IP ranges (196.0.0.0/8 and some others, I believe) to route traffic to South African servers through the cheaper connection.
Known Facts: Most ADSL routers support multiple simultaneous PPPoE connections. Some ADSL routers (like my old D-Link G604T) have advanced routing capabilities that might allow you to do the routing on the device itself. (I haven't really investigated these on-device features.)
In my mind, there are two ways to achieve least-cost routing: configure the router to host and maintain two PPPoE connections (one for int'l, one local) and use advanced routing features of the device to route packets correctly or configure the router to run in Bridge-Mode and set up a "Gentoo-pimping home server" between it and the rest of the network, let the Linux box maintain the PPPoE connections, routing daemon and other network infrastructure daemons.
You could implement a really fancy solution using the second proposal. Set up real IP-address geolocation and throw some Imba HTTP caching, firewalling, proxying nonsense into the mix and you're cooking with gass.
This is a theory that I kicked around in my head while driving to Cape Town a few months back. I was moving in to a flat in Rondebosch (where I now live) and leaving my old ADSL line and D-Link router far behind. I don't actually have ADSL in the flat, yet, so I can't try this out in practice.
Has anyone tried either of these ideas? Has anyone achieved "Least-Cost Routing" on ADSL?
Hypothetical Situation: you want to download a whole bunch of Linux-related files from a local mirror. Instead of wasting int'l bandwidth, you temporarily configure your router to connect to a local account. This saves you money but prevents you from browsing, internationally, for the duration of the download.
Enter the requirement for a home-network that sports "Least-Cost Routing".
Basic idea: some piece of routing software uses knowledge of the South African IP ranges (196.0.0.0/8 and some others, I believe) to route traffic to South African servers through the cheaper connection.
Known Facts: Most ADSL routers support multiple simultaneous PPPoE connections. Some ADSL routers (like my old D-Link G604T) have advanced routing capabilities that might allow you to do the routing on the device itself. (I haven't really investigated these on-device features.)
In my mind, there are two ways to achieve least-cost routing: configure the router to host and maintain two PPPoE connections (one for int'l, one local) and use advanced routing features of the device to route packets correctly or configure the router to run in Bridge-Mode and set up a "Gentoo-pimping home server" between it and the rest of the network, let the Linux box maintain the PPPoE connections, routing daemon and other network infrastructure daemons.
You could implement a really fancy solution using the second proposal. Set up real IP-address geolocation and throw some Imba HTTP caching, firewalling, proxying nonsense into the mix and you're cooking with gass.
This is a theory that I kicked around in my head while driving to Cape Town a few months back. I was moving in to a flat in Rondebosch (where I now live) and leaving my old ADSL line and D-Link router far behind. I don't actually have ADSL in the flat, yet, so I can't try this out in practice.
Has anyone tried either of these ideas? Has anyone achieved "Least-Cost Routing" on ADSL?
