Slashdot Mirror
Multi-Homing Your Home Network?
Jens asks: "For some time now, I have been looking for an affordable solution to multi-home my little network. I have both DSL and cable feeds and it would be nice to combine them with some basic load sharing but more importantly with some failure protection for both incoming and outgoing traffic. My DNS provider allows for round robin access to my two feeds for incoming traffic load sharing and to dynamically change my DNS entry which could be used for feed failure protection. Are there any Slashdot readers who have tackled this problem? Seems like there are quite a few people out there in my shoes but nobody seems to have found the magic solution."
Multihoming and BGP FAQ - has some links to the RFC's etc.
Avi Freedman's site has some very useful docs, in particular his Multihoming for the small ISP, and his newer BGP Routing docs. He even has a powerpoint presentation titled "How to Multi Home" but I have not seen it.
What were the skies like when you were young?
Well if you play with your local routing table a little you can certainly set things up so "certain
" traffic goes in and out one source, and "other" traffic through the other. How could it be better, if Cable and DSL compnaies would treat our connections as "real" connections, with full routing and so forth.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
The workstations all hang off of the "primary" (faster) DSL line, all servers see both. In the event of failure of the "primary", I'll simply change our DHCP server to point to the secondary, move the workstation hubs to the other side of the servers, and we're back in business.
You CAN put both sets of IP addresses through the same network hardware, but unfortunately, Windows 95, and 98 don't do multiple IPs on a single NIC. Our servers are smarter than that.
Hope this helps.
--Mike--
Stop dreaming, no consumer ISP is going to let you send BGP annoucements into their network. Can't blame them though : BGP in novice hands is a very convenient way to fuck up spectacularily.
Go for proxy-based load balancing for the HTTP traffic, go for TEQL (loadsharing over multiple interfaces queuing in order to split the rest, use RIP to announce availability of outbound connections. Basically, you can do almost anything you want with outgoing connections, but you're pretty much stuck if you want inbound failover.
Give me a consumer DSL access provider that does BGP and I'll be a happy man ! Right now, no one gets it unless getting access through large-ish leased lines with lavish support and matching price tag.
You've got round-robin for the outside coming in, that's about as good as you'll probably get without some specialized hardware. For the outbound traffic, you could use iptables' round-robin masquerading. Set up your gateway so that all outbound traffic goes into it. Then set up a rule to masquerade a range of IPs - 2 IPs, in this case. So all of your outgoing traffic appears to have one of 2 source addresses.
:)
This is where I get kinda fuzzy on the setup. You have to figure out a way to send traffic with source address 1 out the cable side while traffic with source address 2 goes out the DSL side. I'm not sure exactly how to do so, but at least that gets you to the point where you just have to filter on one of two source addresses...
Alternatively, what happens when you add 2 default gateways to your routing table? Can you just stick one machine on each cable/dsl connect, and have your network gateway use those 2 machines as its default gateways? That'd be cool if it worked...
You can't have inbound failover, the political structure of the those in control of the internet have deemed that you, as a small player, should not have the ability to do this.
/18 or /19 block of routable IPs from InterNIC (or whatever they are called these days, or in your part of the world), and arrange to BGP peer with several local ISPs, which would give you exactly what you want.
Theoretically, you could obtain a
However, if you think you will actually be able to successfully do this, without licking ass, emptying your wallet and generally getting fucked around by all and sundry, forget it.
The 'routable' internet is pretty much closed to new players, might as well get used to being 'just another host'
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I've put up some tips and things to look for here. In short, you might be better off setting up two routers. TEQL might help with 1 router, haven't gotten it going yet. HTH,
"Nothing was broken, and it's been fixed." -- Jon Carroll
I live in Calif and I can get an 768 SDSL line for 150 a month. A T1 runs about 700$ + local loop chrges which PAC-BELL wants around 300 a month. I wish I lived in an area with some competition but PAC-BELL owns the whole ball of wax down here :(
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
DSL runs $40/mo, bargain basement T1 runs $400/mo (& that's being really optimistic).
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
-
c reen=PROD&Store_Code=NO&Product_Code=200040
Nexland makes a loadsharing/failover/firewall/NAT product that looks interesting. Provides failover/load-balancing for two broadband connections AND a dial-up connection for triple redundancy. Not super-smart about its load-balancing, but it might be enough for what you need. I haven't tried one yet, but am thinking about it. Anyone else have experience with this product?
http://www.nexland.com/nexlandstore/merchant.mv?S
See the 800turbo at Nexland. For $400 you get a router that pretty much looks like many of these home network routers. But it has TWO wan interfaces for load balancing. It even has a serial interface for a dialup fallback if you need to... (lets hope not).