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which *ix suitable for multiplexing two cable modems?

E

exedanni

Member
I am in the situation I have two registered cable modems with my isp. I am looking to be able to use them both simulataneously and get double the bandwidth.

My question is, should I go with either Linux or FreeBSD (want to try it out) to achieve this. The machine would also need to provide a firewall, NAT, and basic HTTP and FTP services. But the most important thing is the aforementioned multiplexing, if that is what combining two lines is called.

Any ideas? Is it even possible?

exedanni
 
I'm not sure this is gonna be beneficial (regardless of possible). On a cable modem you virtually never cap out your bandwidth anyways, your connection is shared with others around you and together you all max out the connection. You multiplex two cable modems and you've doubled your theoretical bandwidth, but your'e still pulling data from that same shared pipe so you'd end up with the same amount of bandwidth anyways.
 
And you may not even get double the "theoretical" bandwidth, if both cable modems are linked to the same account. Have you actually tried downloading something from a fast site simultaneously on both modems, and if so did each modem hit the 1.5mbit (or whatever) limit? I'd be somewhat surprised if that were so; you'd probably see 1/2 of the bandwidth from each modem.
 
OK, the situation is this. I am in the UK, where the download cap is 512k which is about 60 kB/s. So it is pretty easy for me to max that out, and having 120 kB/s would be nice.

So do both FreeBSD and Linux have this multiplexing or load balancing or whatever it is called?

exedanni
 
On a cable modem you virtually never cap out your bandwidth anyways, your connection is shared with others around you and together you all max out the connection.

That's very location dependant, I max out my cap with pretty much every download. I did it when there was no down cap and I would download at >600K/s and I do now that ATT capped us at 128K/s.
 
I believe what you're referring to is often referred to as "bonding." i.e. The ability to take 2 connections (cable, DSL, dial-up, etc) and combine them to produce twice the bandwidth. This will require support from the ISP, and I suspect that it's highly unlikely they'll support it. Without this support, the best you can do is allow for 2 simultaneous downloads -- each of which will max out at no more than 512kbps.
 
You might be able to use some load balancing without the ISP's support, I know Linux supports some types of that and there might be ways to do it with iptables. But I havn't personally tried it.
 
Thanks for your replies, and checking out different methods of doing this. Bonding it is then, since 'eql' is only for serial lines.

The idea is that this should be transparent to the end users, since this machine is gateway for several computers, that is why it is even good that 1Mbits/s downloads won't be possible. Rather, everyone will have descent speed. Also, in peer-to-peer file-sharing I will be able to combine the speeds, so this is enough for me.

So basically what I need to do is get three ethernet cards, bond together eth0 and eth1 (each connected to a 512k cable modem), and connect eth2 to the switch. I know linux and windows support this kind of bonding (or load balancing), what about FreeBSD? This is the OS I want to run, since I have a linux box since a couple of years back.

exedanni
 
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