Load balancing routers

A

ambo

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Does anyone have experience in building a Linux box that will be able to be a router/NAT and load balance between 2 broadband connections.
eg 2 ADSL routers or an ADSL and an iBurst connection.
I'm sure its possible - but a good How-to always helps with the setup...
 
I'll be honest - i didn't know such things existed in the consumer market :D
But i'm also going to be building the router as an invisable proxy and DNS server - so i thought it would be good to build everything into one box.
And i'm interested to explore the technicalities of building such a box - if nothing else just for the educational value ;)
 
Been down this road a few times, gonna plug my site a little. Visit http://www.netlife.co.za and there are links and tips to get you started.

The "Popular box" on the right has links to Hardware dual wan and linux solutions. I have done some work with BSD routing which is far better than linux but have not had the time to put any real detail on my site. There is a link or 2 though.

Good Luck!
 
Load Balance Equipment

Hi,

Check out the Draytek 3300 and the Hotbick.

Can load Balance 4 WAN port.

Search for Draytek on Google SA

Hope trhis helps
 
Karnaugh said:
http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html

The proper guide, on doing it properly.
Click to expand...

That is an excelent guide, however it does not consider several important factors.

Mainly, what happens if one link dies? The linux Kernel CANNOT detect dropped links, pull a network cable out and it still thinks the link is up.

You need to consider dead gateways etc, and worst of all the stock kernel does not support user defined multiple static routes.

You will definately need to patch the kernel if you want to do it "properly"

An truely excelent howto is available here

If you want to get the most out of a dual wan solution go for a BSD solution, the stock kernel already supports IP pooling and detects dead gateways, half your work is already done.
 
We use the Radware LinkProof devices to do our redundancy and load balancing for our clients...

Does everything from Load Balancing, Redundancy, Prioritisation, Bandwidth Management, IPS, Inbound Load Balancing, Redundancy VPN etc.

www.radware.com

R30k per device. :)
 
Anybody used Mikrotik RouterOS for load balancing? in theory it should work, just never had the nead for it.
 
Gromitt said:
Anybody used Mikrotik RouterOS for load balancing? in theory it should work, just never had the nead for it.
Click to expand...

It seems (from their wiki page) that it (Mikrotik) can only use round-robin-based load balancing. The DLink DLM-3500 claims many different types of load balancing, including link utilization type of load balancing. But of course it depends on how well it works....
 
Most will use round robin load balancing, if you want to combine 2 connections your ISP will have to do some work on there side. with Round Robin if you use a download manager it will pull data from both connections as it opens multiple connections.

Pfsense forum has a lot of help if needed.
 
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