Re: Connection Link Aggregation

[Al Zick <al%familysafeinternet.com@localhost>]

Hello Gerard,

On Apr 17, 2012, at 6:58 PM, Gerard Lally wrote:

> On Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:34:37 -0400
> Al Zick <al%familysafeinternet.com@localhost> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > We have very poor connectivity in our office. We have a satellite
> > connection, but it is usually either very slow or simply does not
> > work at all. DSL, ISDN, T1, and cable are not available and even cell
> > phones don't work very well here. We are willing to invest in more
> > phone lines and modems. I was wondering if the following setup is
> > doable. I want to connect 4 to 8 modems to a machine running NetBSD
> > and then bind them and set the machine as a gateway/router for the
> > rest of our network. Can I bond them in such a way to achieve
> > transfer rates of 224k or higher? Also, will this effect latency? I
> > would really like less latency than what satellite offers.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Al
>
>
> With pf you can do round-robin routing on multiple WAN interfaces. You
> won't get transfer rates equalling the aggregate of all your lines but
> you will not have one line (FTP download, for example) tying up your
> bandwidth. So if you have two 56k lines and round-robin routing sends
> your FTP download out over the first channel then you will still  
> have a
> 56k line free for other work.

So, will this give me 112k then?



> I have this working successfully on a firewall running OpenBSD (set  
> up before I knew much about NetBSD) - check their address pools and
> load-balancing FAQ to get an idea of what's happening. Then come  
> back to
> NetBSD and man pf.conf(5).


OK. This looks do able.



> Note that https connections don't like this so you would need to  
> set up
> your PF so that traffic to port 443 is routed to a single WAN gateway.
> As far as I remember FTP is another protocol that doesn't play well  
> with round-robin routing. Again, just pick your best line and route  
> FTP
> client requests out through that line. Once your normal mail and web
> traffic sees this first line saturated it will be automatically routed
> by PF to the second WAN interface.

This is something that I didn't think about, but is very helpful  
info. I will need to keep this in mind when setting it up.


Sincerely,
Al