Connection Teaming (Cable & DSL)

[acebathound]

Hey all.. have a few questions on connection teaming (ie channel bonding, etc) of a cable connection and a DSL connection. Basically, my family's cable ISP was @home and it's now back to a local cable modem ISP (which frankly hasn't been near as fast as it was on @home or as stable). They depend on the the connection for doing business on the internet, and it's vital that we have a connection (mainly for 6 months out of the year.. the other 6 months they don't do internet-related business as much). So I got to looking around.. I had known you could channel bond two dial-up modems and saw that some people had tried and successfully implemented bonding of two cable modems, etc. I'd rather not have cable & dial-up, as the reason we got the cable modem in the first place was so we didn't have to tie up the phone lines.

Anyway, basically my question here is this.. what types of software & hardware am I looking at to do this sort of thing? I currently have a Netgear RT314 and a hub.. it almost seems like I'd have to scrap the RT314 and put 3 NICS in a linux/bsd server.. with a cable connection going to one NIC, the dsl connection going to the other NIC, and the last NIC being for the LAN sharing of the connection. Is there an inexpensive router out there that can take two high-speed connections? I've set up proxy servers in Windows and Linux before, but have never done anything with channel bonding. I'm assuming if one connection failed, the other connection would still be up and running, allowing internet access (this is mainly what we need it for.. but the extra speed would be bonus =). I have a fair amount of *nix, hardware & networking experience under my belt, so feel free to speak in technical jargon if you are so inclined 🙂 Any help would be appreciated.. not totally sure if we'll end up going this route.. but it just seems like if we drop the cable modem and just go with DSL.. and the DSL connection has problems once in a while, then we're still in the same boat. The odds of both of them having problems at once would be a bit higher.

-Ace

 

[gaidin123]

This is exactly what you're looking for and it's the only piece of affordable hardware that I've ever seen mention of in these forums that does the job. 🙂

Connection teaming or redundancy under Linux is possible but it's rather complicated from what I've read. If you're interested in going that route check out the Linux Advanced Routing Howto available at http://www.ds9a.nl/2.4Routing/#download.

Good luck! Let us know how it goes and what you decide! 🙂

Gaidin

 

[Garion]

Fat Pipe Networks has a software app that will do the same kind of thing under Windows. Probably a lot cheaper than the hardware router, but likely not as fast.

- G

 

[acebathound]

What applications are used in *nix to perform connection teaming? I've seen multilink (but that's just for PPP?).. I've also heard of link aggregation and of course, connection teaming.. but after scouring for 4 or 5 hours, haven't really found out much info on exactly what would be used in this situation. There appears to be a fair number of Windows programs to get the job done, but I'd rather do it in *nix if I don't do it through a hardware router.