Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Multi-Homing Your Home Network?

Posted by Cliff on from the load-balancing-and-failure-protection dept.

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."

2 of 22 comments (clear)

  1. Can be done, could be better by haplo21112 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  2. Multi-homed network by ka9dgx · · Score: 3, Interesting
    At work, we have twin DSL feeds, one wireless based (through Teligent) and one a conventional DSL. Both ISPs give us a 64 address IP block. I put dual NICs in all the servers, and set up dual hubs, etc. I did this more to make it easier to troubleshoot for myself than for any other reason. We host all of our own services, including DNS through this, and it works well.

    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--