Dual ISP connections for a game server for more bandwidth?

[MysticLlama]

I know that aggregating connections doesn't always work for acceleration simply because of dealing with two IPs, possibly two physical networks, etc.

What about though, something like a game server, on a box with two IPs? Would it naturally just send packets back to the IP that the client requested from?

If it's not a thing commonly programmed into games now, is there anything that would stop something like this?

It seems to me like it'd be a good way to get some more bandwidth out of certain situations.

i.e. at the office, I'm busy *trying* to get my new DS1 line to work. I'm also keeping the DSL we have though (1.2mb down / 894k up) just for a backup, maybe to do some other stuff with, because it's cost-effective and we wouldn't save much by turning it off.

Well, I was thinking that at night I could run a BF1492 server, but after seeing the insane bandwidth requirements, a T1 isn't going to hack more than 16 people or so. On the other hand, with 2.5 (which I'd have close to if I could use both) I could host a decent 24-32 player server possibly.

Any thoughts on if it will work, or any reason it wouldn't if games were programmed like this in the future?

I just see it as x number of people connect to one IP, and x number also connect to the other. Maybe I'll see if I can try it on a LAN and see if it works.

Just a thought.

 

[gaidin123]

Well, say you run a game server on a box with 2 NICs, each with their own IP. I think in basically every game server you set up it will require that it bind to a single IP address. You could easily set up 2 servers on the same box bound to separate NICs but I don't think that is what you want to do in this case.

That Nexland dual WAN connection load balancing router that gets brought up here in the forums as "the" example for dual net connections might help you do what you want. http://www.nexland.com/turbo.cfm.

Another option that might possibly work but others could probably yea or nay it is to add aliases to a NIC for each of your subnets/net connections. I'm assuming that with connection A you have subnet A/24 and connection B you have subnet B/24. Set up IPs on your 1 NIC for each of your A/24 and B/24 networks. If the game server simply binds to an interface and NOT the IP address of that interface then you would just have to figure out a way to have people connect to both IPs in a balanced fashion (ie more people on the faster network, less on the DSL). However I'm guessing your game server still will only advertise one IP address in which case everyone who clicked on it in a game browser would be sent to that IP, through that one connection.

However, that explanation probably won't work well unless everyone knew which IP to connect to, and that would probably be a lot of work.

The Nexland router does do load balancing but I believe it's more geared towards downstream balancing? By running a game server it will advertise a single IP address. I'm not sure what would happen when a player tried to connect to A/24 IP and the router tries to transparently forward it to B/24 IP. I don't think it would work...

Gaidin