Traffic shaping/aggregating

[hewitt_tech]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ben Scott" <dragonhawk at gmail.com>
To: <gnhlug-discuss at mail.gnhlug.org>
Sent: Tuesday, December 26, 2006 12:06 PM
Subject: Re: Traffic shaping/aggregating


> On 12/26/06, Bruce Dawson <jbd at codemeta.com> wrote:
>> Although it would make sense that she would use one modem, and I the
>> other; it stops making sense when you consider the various (shared)
>> printers, file servers and other servers on our LAN that we need access
>> to in our daily tasks.
>
>  The simplest way to solve your problem is to put one cable modem on
> one LinkSys box, the other modem on a different LinkSys box, configure
> the LAN sides of each box with their own IP address, and manually
> configure each workstation to use a particular LinkSys box as the
> Internet gateway.  It's a kludge, but it works.
>
>  More complicated and somewhat less kludgey would be to use a router
> with at least three interfaces: One for the LAN and one for each
> modem.  Assign static IP addresses to the nodes you want using a
> particular modem.  Configure policy routing and NAT such that those IP
> address get routed via a particular interface and address.
>
>  The Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control HOWTO at
> http://lartc.org/ explains the details.
>
>  One word of warning, last I tried it (on kernel 2.4 a few years
> ago), port forwarding via iptables was unaware of policy routing.  As
> I recall, port forwarding always ended up using the default tables, or
> something along those lines.
>
>> Does anyone know of good reference material regarding "aggregating", or
>> otherwise combining the two cable modem's throughput into a single
>> network segment ...
>
>  "Aggregation" usually means turning multiple feeds into one, in
> particular, such that a single node on your LAN would get twice the
> bandwidth, even for a single TCP connection.
>
>  There's no real way to aggregate two consumer cable modem feeds like
> that.  The ISP's routing plan doesn't include multiple routes to a
> single customer site.  Two cable modems are effectively two different
> sites.  They also don't support anything like layer two bonding.
>
>  You can get a form of load balancing on a per-connection basis.
> That is, one TCP connection would use one modem, the next would use
> the other, and so on.  This has all the same problems as NAT.  It also
> does the wrong thing if two existing connections pinned to one modem
> start sucking bandwidth.  Prolly not what you want.
>
> -- Ben


How about using the LinkSys RV042/82 series router which has dual wide area 
network connections and can do load balancing?

-Alex