[PLUG] Combining two ISP connections to increase bandwidth?

[Sriram Narayanan]

On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:12 PM, Mayuresh<mayuresh at acm.org> wrote:
> Fed up of downtime of my ISP and having heard the same stories about another
> ISP operating in the area, I am wondering whether it's possible to subscribe
> to both of them for redundancy.
>
> However, it won't be an economical proposition if used only for redundancy.
> Also, as a home user there are no multiple simultaneous users. So only way
> both connections would get utilized (when both are up!) and give value for
> money is if for a single user they both could serve in tandem. In other words,
> let's say I have both connections of 128 kbps, I should get an effective
> download speed of 256kbps for download of even a SINGLE file (and not multiple
> files simultaneously).
>

I've tried using iptables to achieve such stuff, but when it comes to
high performance and flexible networking, openBSD and opensolaris'
crossbow far out class what the present-day Linux TCP/IP stack can
deliver.

You could try http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html

What I figured out was that there's some funky routing table
manipulation that happens which makes traffic for a particular
destination go out via one specific ISP.

A colleague then setup a really interesting openBSD based firewall
which gave us load balancing + failover, and consumed just 35% CPU
load as against a linux kernel's 90% CPU load consumption.

We had to abandon that at a corporate level because we needed to all
gain proficiency with OpenBSD's firewall tools, and all of us didn't
have the bandwidth and time to devote to fresh learning.

> To the extent I searched around, it looks difficult or impossible. I think it's
> a reasonable consumer expectation, though do not know about its feasibility.
>
> Any ideas?

I installed Vyatta today, and am in parallel writing a Python based
web UI for opensolaris' crossbow.

For home users, I'd say that you use the info in the link here
(http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html) and use a
multi segmented download manager which would make connects via both
the ISPs (hopefully).

Alternatively, if you are a GNU userland user (most of us are) and
just need Gnome/KDE with a variety of desktop tools (multimedia,
internet tools, office productivity), then give one of the BSDs a shot
and use the underlying networking tools that come in the BSD land.

>
> Mayuresh.
> _______________________________________
> Pune GNU/Linux Users Group Mailing List
>

-- Sriram