[nycbug-talk] Internet 768kb and up on a budget

[alex at pilosoft.com]

On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, George Georgalis wrote:

> I was suprised at Alex's point that two dsl lines would work. It's just
> a few command lines (once you know them) in Linux to load balance
> multiple gateways, and many linksys routers have an option for redundant
> gateways / loadbalancing for your lan.
> 
> But I don't think either of these will increase max bandwidth of a given
> connection, ie, it may provide two 768K uplinks at the same time but not
> one 1536. Maybe there is some transfer protocol that can take advantage
> of two gateways, (rsync and cvsup come to mind) but I'm not sure if they
> would do it.
Correct, linux doesn't do per-packet-load-balancing.  PPLB is not a
perfect solution, however, it works in 99% of cases. (The cases where it
doesn't work are things sensitive to packet reordering. Fortunately, all
modern TCP stacks are OK with it). 

Doing PPLB on linux it is *probably* not so hard to hack in, but I haven't
tried.

You can also do link aggregation with mlpppoe (multilink ppp over
ethernet). Very hacky, but I've done that.

> An isp provided soekris for interface bridging does indeed sound like a
> good thing.
Why use soekris when you can use cisco. Although, on this mailing list,
most people would probably say 'why use cisco when you can use soekris'...

-alex