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Working With 2 ISPs For Home Networking?
An anonymous reader writes "This is, I think, a simple question — but one which I can't get the answer to.
As a typical, but perhaps high-demand home user I would like to use 2 separate ISPs. ADSL is pretty cheap nowadays, and 2 x ADSL seems a better value than one fast one — especially in terms of reliability.
If one breaks, at least the other will work.
Using an old box as a router/firewall, how can I configure a system to use two completely separate ISPs in a sensible manner?
Ideally, I'd like the load of my browsing to be balanced, but at the minimum, I'd want some kind of 'fail-over.' If I leave torrents running over night, I'd like the router to use whichever connection doesn't block the traffic — and preferably for it to reset the errant connection.
Ideas?"
Install linux. Get a software router on it.
I'd post more but I don't know how to do this, but this is probably what you want.
ADSL is pretty cheap nowadays, and 2 x ADSL seems a better value than one fast one â" especially in terms of reliability. If one breaks, at least the other will work.
When your DSL is down, it's likely that your neighbor's DSL is down too. Consider cable + DSL, not cable + cable or DSL + DSL.
I'd figure that using cable/dsl mixture would be better, since the systems work over entirely different topology. I tried two cable modems at once years ago when they were limited to around 1.5mb dl, and used one of them for gaming traffic, and the other for web traffic... this was for a lan party. It was done strictly by port. I know you can do software load balancing, but I'm not sure how.
Tibbon
tibbon.com
You can get a "Firebox" VPN/Firewall/Router pretty cheap on ebay. They are running about $75.00US for the Firebox 1200/2. The "/2" part means it has 2 WAN ports and you can load balance across both, it is setup to be redundant, so if one goes down, it moves all traffic to the other automagically. I use one and it works like a champ. There are more expensive solutions, and probably "Roll your own" solutions, but as most of us know, that can provide months and months of aggravation!
"My immediate reaction is "WTF? What kind of moron doesn't make things 64-bit safe to begin with?" Linus
There are little Linux distributions like Brazilfw which run on old hardware and work out of the box with features like QOS, load-balancing, port forwarding, etc. Maybe that's what you need.
it's actually pretty simple to set up. I would suggest using a Mikrotik setup. They mainly design wireless equipment, but their routerOS is great and the equipment it runs on is dirt cheap and powerful, and to top it off load balancing of 2 interfaces is only a single command away.
pfSense can handle the load balance and failover for you. Then you just need to get two ISPs. Preferably one cable + one DSL but if you can get the two DSL lines on separate circuits, that would work well.
Isn't a dual-WAN router the simplest/cheapest method, whatever you are planning to put downstream of it? http://www.networkworld.com/reviews/2004/0913rev.html
I don't have any clue how a home user would integrate two ISP connections. At work, we use a system called "Fat Pipe" to connect to our Comcast for Business line and our other ISP with our T1 lines. I assume that costs too much for a home user to invest in.
called Clarkconncect (http://www.clarkconnect.com/)
It's basically a CentOs (aka free Red Hat) wich can do multi-Wan. It has a nice web interface fir Firewall, ftp, web and mail server, shell..
No idea if it can reset errant connections, but it can do anything you can on redhat, including using two Wans simultaneously. (chek Clarkconnects forums for multi wan)
up and running within 30 minutes, mine has reached 165 days uptime (Bi-P3 GHz, 2 Go Ram, 4*500Go HDD, 3*Eth 100 (upgraded from a faithfull Compaq Deskpro 400 Mhz "server")- web, mail, and bittorrent dowvnloader (torrentflux-bart) as well as "media server" connected to the xbox with XBMC)
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
That's your answer to everything.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.loadshare.html
Check it out.
Most DSL circuits, even sold by different vendors, go through the same facilities and sometimes the same equipment. For example, the local loop is usually the local telco's, no matter who your DSL vendor is. And many DSL vendors resell one of a few wholesale providers (e.g., Covad), so your data on both DSL lines could be going through the same wholesale provider's equipment/facilities. The same may be true of other technologies (e.g., fiber).
In trying to setup something similar, we finally settled on using cable for one circuit and fiber for the other. We know the cable company has its own local loop, and they assured us (FWIW) that they have their own facilities out to their upstream provider (e.g., AT&T, Sprint, etc.). Fiber would be Verizon. We would use DSL, but I'm concerned that it would end up in the same Verizon facilities.
Good luck. There are also routers that do fail-over, but I know that's not what you asked about.
uh no.
twin dsl makes no sense.
cable/dsl makes perfect sense.
Hotbrick makes a very good load-balancing soho router. They're a bit pricey but they seem to work quite well for exactly what you're describing. Take a look on ebay for their LB series.
I do have to second the suggestion of using Cable+DSL rather than DSL+DSL. Most places where there are multiple DSL providers, they're both operating from the same physical infrastructure with one reselling the service of the other. It's certainly better than one by itself, though.
Even people that believe in pre-destiny look both ways before crossing the street.
MLPPP
2) Don't try to setup 2 isp's yourself, you are too stupid to find the Linux Advanced Routing Mini HOWTO, and you will have a lot of trouble with the two connections if you don't have a clue about networking.
http://www.google.com/products?q=load+balance+router
There's a dlink home level one I know of - I have one in the closet doing ADSL and cable for me at the moment - it's a couple of years old and was probably $90 or something at the time.
In our small business, we have both business Cable broadband and a T1 line. We use the Cisco 1825 Router which has dual WAN interfaces and very robust load-balancing capabilities. Setting up an old box to load-balance two ISPs will be a huge pain in the ass, so you might be better off with a preconfigured off-the-shelf solution.
Also, where are you finding ADSL providers that don't offer declining per-megabit rates? http://www.covad.com/web/services/broadband/business_dsl.html
Covad DSL charges more for dual 3mbps connections than a single 15mbps connection. You might check your math again to make sure getting two slow ADSL connections isn't a lot less speed per dollar than a single fast connection.
There are routers out there that will take two or more WAN inputs. I have owned two different Linksys models that do that and they work okay. You can do load balancing or failover with the ones that I have had. The load balancing is essentially session based, so if you were doing a big download, you wouldn't get the speed of both lines, just the one that was handling that session. But for a lot of things you do use both links.
Here are the ones that I have owned:
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1123638171618&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=7161822279B08
and
http://www.linksys.com/servlet/Satellite?c=L_Product_C2&childpagename=US%2FLayout&cid=1123638171675&pagename=Linksys%2FCommon%2FVisitorWrapper&lid=7167522279B09
The top one is about $150 and supports VPN as well. I've seen similar boxes from other vendors and you can do this with Linux/BSD as well.
I was thinking about a similar scenario and found this website:
http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html
I haven't tried it yet, but it seems do-able (in the non-sexual way).
Honestly, I think that's not understanding how DSL works very well. In virtually all markets, there's one physical DSL provider, and a few dozen 'ISPs' which cost a little bit more to provide potentially 'unique' services on top. One monopoly for phone (and hence DSL), one monopoly for cable.
Er, the cheapest DSL is what, around $25, $30, for 256k? Double that, and you've got a price for very fast (8mbit or more) cable, including 256-512kbit upstream. Even if you have 2x256k, and the equipment to use it in a decently efficient manner, that's still some 512kbit, and two different IPs.
Only in a few situations can you use the bandwidth of both cooperatively for a single task, and the most common failure is based on when the physical link/line conditions deteriorate, in which case having two ports to the same network isn't going to make any difference at all.
Cable/DSL will provide the potential reliability you'd be looking for, I think. But, as a home user, some 98-99% (even if not 99.97%) uptime isn't good enough? For the additional cost, it's not worth the extra -average- hour per month of downtime you gain 'back'.
If your ISPs downtime is any more than that, you have every right to complain, twist their arm to fix whatever might be causing the problem.
"A Goddess rarely smiles for she is forced by others to be an island unto herself." - Zephiris
If you're more bothered about redundancy then extra bandwidth, and you're in a geographyically capable location it may be worth getting a router with a dual WAN (such as ADSL/3G). Vigor sell ones that support a 3G modem, such as http://www.buydraytek.com/draytek-vigor-2910g-p-55.html
These have good QoS options and also bandwidth on demand.
Failing that, as others have said you would probably be better with cable/some other medium as a backup. Generally DSL faults are more likely to be in the ATM/last mile section, where infrastructure is usually shared with ISPs.
Second answer: assuming you already have DSL or cable from one provider, get a second line from a different provider (this means cable if you already have DSL and vice-versa, unless you can fool a retail telco into wiring your house with a second line. ) Set up a Linux or BSD box with two interfaces. Spend a lot of time with your nose in networking how-tos, tutorials, scripting, and man pages.
What your trying to do would require you to get routes from both ISP's which is something in my experience that they won't provide you with a residential DSL connection. They would usually at least require a business connection which costs a lot more than it sounds like your willing to spend. Also, unless you have a block of IP's assigned from one of the ISP's that would allow you to be multihomed you would have to have two different IP ranges for all of your machines. Thats OK I guess but it doesn't really help for failover purposes like you are seeking. Also, you will have to learn how to run BGP since that is how most multihomed systems work.
My cable provider wants huge fees for any service with static IPs, so I went with their high speed, consumer-oriented plan, which is reasonably priced. My DSL provider offers slow speed and static IPs at moderate cost. I put the two together with a load sharing or fall-over solution like the Netgear FVX538, and it's been working really well. (The FVX538 is perhaps the most reliable device I've ever owned from the company -- absolutely no trouble at all with it in a year of service.) The static IPs are used primarily for e-mail, where the slow speed of DSL doesn't really matter. Browsing and downloads all go over cable.
A dual-WAN router is the easiest way to go, but I wouldn't call it cheap. A decent dual-WAN router will cost you about twice what it would cost to build a cheap, but decent linux box.
Clarkconnect works great, but you'll have to pay to get the dual WAN feature. I've used a Clarkconnect box with Cable+DSL for 3+ years and it "just works", so it was worth the $ for me. pfSense is supposed to do failover, but I never got it to work. You could also look at some hardware solutions. Google for dual wan router. Just remember that the two pipes won't behave as a single connection. You can configure the router to alternate between the connections or to pick one or the other based on type of traffic, but each download is going to happen over just one of your lines.
Seriously? Is your network infrastructure -that- unreliable that its actually worth *doubling* your costs for redundancy?
I have had maybe 10-15 hours of internet-only downtime in the last 8 years. Of that, maybe 4 hours affected me (ie I was awake and wanted to use the internet). I've had another 10-15 hours of power fail in the last 8 years, and even with backup power the internet was still down (routers, switches, etc in the upstream path weren't on backup power so keeping my 'modem' up isn't worth beans.
In any case, I can see a lot of situations where it would be worth another $2500 over that period to have had internet access for those couple hours.
If I were running servers (and I am), it might be worth it, but in practice its not worth the trouble. round-robin DNS just means every odd connection attempt fails if one of the links is down, and dynamic dns updates to take the downed link out of rotation would be great except most internet outages are over before dns updates are likely to propogate. So its just not effective.
If I wanted -faster- downloads, that might be worth 2 connections, but that's not what you claimed your objective was. And even then, it usually won't make a specific download faster, but will rather let you do 2 at once at full speed (in the case of a large http or download for example which only uses one connection) which may or may not be what you need. Torrents, using multiple connections, will of course benefit from the extra bandwidth capacity.
If you SERIOUSLY want redundancy, you might want to look at a router that can fail-over to dialup. That will actually stand of chance of being available during a power failure, and might not cost you extra in terms of service, since many ISPs give you some free dialup hours as part of your broadband. And the dialup infrastructure is often separate enough from the adsl/cable infrastructure that you'll be able to connect on dialup while adsl/cable is down.
You just get a Linux box with 2 NICs and start adding static routes :
route add 1.1.1.1 255.255.255.255 eth0
route add 1.1.1.2 255.255.255.255 eth1
route add 1.1.1.3 255.255.255.255 eth0
Etc, etc....
It might seem like a big job, but there's huge ranges of reserved addresses you can skip. Let us know how you get on.
Unfortunately it does not double your bandwidth for normal stuff. My rv016 does round robin load balancing which helps a little bit. It really depends on the providers though. My DSL is more reliable than my cable but my cable is much fast than my DSL. The main difference is latency as my DSL has higher ping times. So the net effect is about nothing when I use both. However when I'm downloading something large (which is rare) I can still surf fast. The software on the rv016 is not ideal though so my bandwidth could be used more effectively.
I am planning on switching out the rv016 for a pfsense box at some point. I run the pfsense box for my business.
Most people here will tell you to build a linux box, and they aren't wrong to do so.
However you can also use OpenBSD and build an active-active or active-passive firewall with two
devices if you like using CARP. Depends on how critical you consider your internet connection.
Either way load balancing across multiple ISPs is trival in OpenBSD's pf and is in fact one of their
example configurations on their website. http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/pools.html
Although their pf syntax can appear intimidating at first, it's actually quite easy. Good luck.
If you get both cable Internet and DSL, there are some interesting options. Cable usually has better downlink bandwidth than DSL, but DSL has better uplink bandwidth, especially during peak periods. So sending some or all of the upstream packets on the DSL link while getting all the incoming traffic on the cable link could be a win. The IP of the cable link can be used for sending on the DSL link or the cable link. The downstream direction of the DSL link is unused. You'll need to configure a local router to handle this, but you don't need to go all the way to BGP and getting your own autonomous system number.
What you want is a "dual wan" router. Which will give you two ways out, by default putting each connection between your local host and a remote host over a single WAN's route, but pool the two WANs so the less-full one gets the whole next connection.
Then you want to look into "bonding", or whatever the router vendor calls their version of it. It usually doesn't work, because the two different WANs usually take very different routes most of the way to the remote host, and the bonding has to accommodate all the hops between on each of the two WAN routes. But sometimes it does work, especially if the routers at both ends of the routes share the same bonding technique.
But you will indeed get immediate uptime benefits. Because if one WAN gives you, say, 99.9% uptime, that's 0.1% downtime, which is still over 31,000 seconds down a year, which is still almost 9 hours. But if you can get connections over either one WAN or the other (each at 99.9%), you can get 99.9999% uptime, which is only about 32 seconds a year, which is unattainable at reasonable prices for a home user.
--
make install -not war
Great, so you googled some shit. Maybe he wants to get some people's experiences with them? What is good or bad?
A witty saying proves you are wittier than the next guy.
I do this currently for several clients using PFsense (www.pfsense.org) . Its a BSD based free project that can run on pretty much any x86 hardware. All you would need would be an old 1Ghz or so PC with 3 network cards, and a little bit of patience. Will do connection based load balancing as well as failover....if you set it up right.
I don't have any real experience, but I've seen Pfsense recommended often for a Multiple-Wan capable router OS.
It sounds like multihomed routing is what you're looking for. there's a decent intro here:
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2002/08/12/multihoming.html
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
http://www.pfsense.com/
I'm not using 2 connections, but I do have my fiber connection connected to two failover firewalls on OpenBSD 4.3 with PF. :-) )
Carp provides IP failover, PFsync ensures connections are synced on both machines. I can kick down the active firewall and the other ones takes over at once without dropping any internal or external connections. (if only it would also mirror ssh sessions to itself
The one thing I'm working out now is getting a connection running between them so all the internal nics (regular lan, dmz, wireless) can be active independantly of which firewall has the active connection to the internet. When I've got that I'll put up the basic configuration on my website.
home
Recent events (FLOODS) have shown me how fragile my DSL service here is. My provider's DSL was down for the entire state for several days. So I called my local nephew-of-satin cable co and had them install a cable modem last week.
I run a web server, mailserver, and numerous other hobby services here, so I had the "business grade DSL", which is 936/1536. (divide kbps by 9 for a good guestimate in kb/sec, so 100 up, 170 down) DSL always provides me with that speed, it never fluctuates so I get every penny I pay for. I also pay a bit extra for a block of 8 (5 usable) static IP addresses which my services require.
By comparison, the cable offers many more tiers of service, and I opted for again the "business class" service. This I was told was 2k/20k. When he brought the modem I ran a speed test. The installer scoffed at those numbers (about 1.7/15k) and told me "You never really get 2/20, that's the theoretical maximum, just like DSL" at which point I had to show him what DSL really gives you.
Another entertaining surprise was that the cable co did not offer static IP addresses in my area. I talked with my "business representative" for my area of town and he agreed, "Yes that does make my job rather difficult." Offering business internet service without static IP option, I feel sorry for that salesman. Like running a grocery store but not carrying milk. My speeds were about 1.7/15k when we tested it during the install, but it's actually been clocking in very close to 2 up lately.
Not having a lot of experience in multiple simultaneous ISPs took a little digging to get things working properly. "multilink multihoming" I believe is the correct term for having two ISPs on the same machine. Being able to USE them both at the same time is the trick. Most OSs like to reply back on the default interface, regardless of which one the traffic came in on. First requirement was to get a second nic for my server. Without that, the SYN packets came in on the 2nd nic and tried leaving on the first nic, which wasn't going to work of course.
After that was settled it still didn't work, ACK packets were not being forwarded by my router. This required a special bit of software on the server, IPNetRouterX, to modify the traffic since OS X puts default gateway information on the packets even from the non-default source. (speculating this was causing the router to just toss out the packets) Ever since that it's been working very well. During my troubles I talked with numerous people and got a mix of responses. Some were wondering why I was having any problem at all, and others were telling me they fought it for a long time and never got it to work, (mostly unix ppl in both groups) so I assume some unix network stacks support this and some do not, be sure to check your distro.
Now this is with the server answering on two distinct IP addresses. This is not fail-over, it's one server that can answer requests from two different connections at the same time. Maybe not quite what you are looking for. If I wanted to use it for fail-over I would have to change my DNS entries. This would take awhile to propagate of course. But if you could update your DNS entry quickly enough, such as by getting a registrar that had a very SHORT expiration on your entries, (DYNDNS) this could work as a hot-failover. Not a matter of the backup coming online automatically when needed, but of it always being online.
A common thing to do in cases like this is to have your DNS server serve up your two (or more) IP addresses in a round-robin fashion. Try doing a DNS lookup on microsoft.com several times and you will see you are getting different IPs each time. (I currently get 207.46.197.32 and 207.46.232.182 for microsoft.com) If you have two ISPs, and hand out your two addresses round-robin, that will give you some automatic failover for your dual always-online providers, and if one of them craps out, users will just have to notice the timeout, and click the connect button a second time to connect until things get fixed.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
If you want to go the Cisco route, you can also look in to OER, http://www.cisco.com/en/US/tech/tk1335/tsd_technology_support_sub-protocol_home.html.
I've used it for a few locations that have multiple ISP's and it works well.
As others have suggested, 2 DSL providers will both go out if the physical DSLAM goes down in most markets. Cable + DSL backup is going to be the most diverse and reliable in case of outage.
Several others suggested linux or other hardware boxes. My suggestion is also proven and very easy, fast and reliable.
If you have an old x86 box lying around.. download pfSense onto it and load it with 3 or more nics (preferably Intel - very cheap on eBay). pfSense does multi-WAN, multi-LAN, QoS, UPnP, nice RRD graphs to track your usage, and about anything you could think of with a very nice web gui. http://pfsense.org/
Another option, the one I went for as do many wireless ISPs: Alix.2C1 single board computer and load pfSense onto that. I got mine at netgate - http://www.netgate.com/product_info.php?cPath=60_84&products_id=503 .2C3, and it can easily handle my 16/2 comcast biz class connection peaking at 30% CPU and 25% ram usage or less - even running BT, VoIP and several users web surfing with seamless QoS.
pfSense is based on the uber reliable m0n0wall. my uptime is currently 80 days. That's only because I rebooted for certain config changes - most do not require reboot. I know of guys who run it for years without a hiccup. Been running very happily for 6 months now.get that kit and a null-modem cable if you don't have one. I use the
$0.02
Multihoming:
Cable/DSL
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multihoming
Multihoming caveats:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multihoming#Multihoming_caveats
Get matching NIC cards.
~hylas
I have quite a bit of experience with this, as I use two consumer ADSL circuits to provide very reliable 'net services at my office.
To an extent you either get to use two different services (for reliability) or combine them into one service for improved performance. Not both.
If you're going for reliability, you'll be using two different providers. That eliminates the use of multilink PPPoE to bond the two services into a single logical service with a single public IP address. It also eliminates ATM channel bonding, which is the other way to achieve the same end. This isn't such a great loss as you might think since I've *NEVER* found a provider (at least here in Australia) that knows what either is, let alone supports even one of them.
So, you're stuck with two ADSL circuits, each with separate PPPoE connections (or direct IP over ATM links; either way) and separate public IP addresses.
This sucks. You can't even load balance across them properly without the cooperation of a router/proxy on the other side of your ADSL links.
Load balancing your transmissions on a per-packet basis is obviously hopeless because any sane ISP has egress filtering based on source IP address, and even if they don't you'll still get replies back on the official source IP (so you won't gain much). SNAT won't help because if you SNAT some packets in a connection the recipient will have no idea they're part of the same connection as the unmodified packets leaving on the other connection. The only way that packet-level load balancing across multiple links with different IPs will work is if you're only talking to an endpoint (probably a VPN termination point) that is aware that you're using multiple connections and can combine them. You can use tricks like multilinked PPTP for this, or iptables trickery on each end. In any case, you're going to need access to a server with enough bandwidth to service both connections that's willing to route traffic for you. You probably don't have this.
So, packet-level load balancing is out. What's left? Connection-level, and per-protocol.
Connection level load balancing works well for some services. Outgoing SMTP, for instance, is well suited to being randomly allocated between multiple ADSL links (if you're unfortunate enough to have users who think that 100MB attachments are a good idea). Unfortunately most home user services like HTTP web browsing are not. You'll find that websites like to store session data with your IP address, so if you do connection load balancing with HTTP you'll find that websites keep on forgetting your login. To work around this you need to use "sticky" load balancing that remembers which connection was used to talk to a given host - but that, of course, reduces the benefits of the load balancing.
In the end, all you can really do is a bit of sticky connection-level load balancing when establishing new outgoing connections for some protocol types. If you want more than that, you need to do ugly things like say "all FTP connections go out ADSL1, and all SIP and other VoIP connections go out ADSL2" etc.
Personally, I don't bother even with that. I have both ADSL services listed as MXes for the company's DNS, so if one is down we still get mail. The A record points at a colocated server elsewhere on the Internet, so that's not a worry, but if it didn't I'd have to use some sort of ISP-level or colo load balancing to reroute traffic down whichever link was currently available.
Outgoing connections just all use the primary link when it's up, and fail back to the secondary link if/when the fast one is down. The secondary link is the primary MX, so when both links are up mail will tend to come in one link and everything else in the other.
If I wanted more than this, I'd probably have to route everything through another server colocated at an ISP or peering point. Unless I could get free traffic between it and both my ADSL circuits this would get expensive fast - and it'd also reduce the benefits of the redundant ADSL links
OpenBSD ships with support for round-robin queuing.
This is an interesting idea for a fun hack.
A similar idea that me and a buddy [if you are law enforcement, read: didn't] put into action one afternoon was a BSD box that latched onto as many wireless networks as cards we could find, then queued out to all of them.
BWAHAHAHAHA!! /saturday afternoon hacks ftw.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Whoever tagged this story "Google" certainly has the right idea, and probably insider information... You've probably just described Google's setup exactly. And now we know why Google.com is NEVER down: it is behind two ADSL connections, which sends their availability through the roof.
(On the other hand, it also explains why the home page has to fit on like one network packet...)
I used to do that with ease and great success with OpenBSD.
Using PF for load balancing and relayd to check link status and to automatically change PF rules when needed.
It worked great, never had any single failure with it. It was on a Soekris Net4801.
With OpenBSD 4.3, I think you can even do it without PF, just with routing.
{{.sig}}
The cheapest, easiest load balancing / failover router is the D-Link DI-LB604 - they have discontinued it, but you may be able to find one online (newegg, ebay, craigslist, etc). The issue - I used to work for Telus, Canada's 2nd largest phone company - the DSL from the telco or from any other reseller comes from the same demark. The phone company leases the lines to 3rd party resellers, but the equipment will still be at the same place, with the same point of failure. You cannot have multiple DSL lines on the same phone - it is not possible, physically. The cable / DSL or WDSL/DSL combo would be the way to go.
God, not another person saying this.
Slashdot articles aren't just posted for the question, but for the discussion. Yes, anyone can find an answer to anything they want with Google+Wikipedia+etc.
The point here is that maybe someone will take an interest in it that never thought of it before or cared enough to dig around Google.
Obviously from the author's point of view, multiple viewpoints by the readers would be helpful. However from the Slashdot mods (and community in general) it's an interesting enough topic to read on their own.
What you ask is very simple to do with a dual DSL router; Hawking Technology makes one that isn't too expensive and easy to set it up (http://www.hawkingtech.com/products/productlist.php?CatID=36&FamID=43&ProdID=20). I'm an ISP who provides DSL. DSL depends on the DSLAM and phone line condition. Two phone lines to your house from the same phone company can be VERY different in quality and it is line quality that is most important with DSL. After that, a problem could occur with the providers DSLAM; but if you have two DSL lines, odds are very much against both lines being on the same card in the DSLAM and if you are in a large community, they most likely won't even be on the same DSLAM.
You will be dual NAT'd (only way to do two balanced DSL connections). Bittorrent will work fine in this situation even if one ISP blocks it. However, other P2P programs may be inconsistant since you don't have much control over which port the router will choose on an application basis.
I've set these up; believe me, they work.
I have recently looked into this for a project and here is some information I found.
http://www.cyberciti.biz/howto/question/static/linux-ethernet-bonding-driver-howto.php
http://linux-ip.net/html/ether-bonding.html
http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Internet/ADSL-Bonding-How-To-and-Review.html
If you want to use two DSL modems, the best option for this is to use actual PCI ADSL modems, such as the Sangoma S518. If you are using a stand-alone DSL modem/router you will be limited greatly by the hardware whithin it. Using an internal DSL card you will be able to directly connect to the ATM network without using multiple bridges between multiple technologies. This allows layer 2 bonding (if your ISP supports MLPPP) instead of just layer 3 bonding. This means you can load balance each alternating bit (much like RAID striping), instead of just by connection (as in the case of server load balancing).
In the US you can find a CLEC (Competetive Local Exchange Carier) in your area. The Public Utilities Commision in your state should provide a list of registered CLECs. Call them all and ask if they provide Bonded ADSL links, and how much they charge. Ask them if they are just a Reseller CLEC or if they are actually a Facilities-Based Colocation CLEC.
CLECs are smaller phone companies. In almost all cases they are much more flexible and customer-oriented. Their support staff are usually the same guys that actually go out in the field and hook people up, not just some outsourced company in India or Pakistan.
CLECs come in two flavors, Reseller and Facilities-Based. Reseller CLECS are just marketing companies, they don't provide any services and will not be able to provide anything beyond that which your ILEC provides. Facilities-Based CLECs actually have facilities and rely on the ILEC as little as possible for providing services. In many cases the copper lines going to your house are all owned by the ILEC so they will need to lease the last leg of the circuit from the ILEC, or your location may be outside of the area they provide service so they will lease a digital circuit to your location and provide the ISP portion of the Internet connection.
On the Colorado Public Utilities Commision website they provide a PDF document of all CLECs in Colorado:
http://www.dora.state.co.us/PUC/telecom/TelcomProviders.htm
Your state should provide a list as well in some form.
If you are using Cable Internet and ADSL to provide even greater redundancy (I would strongly suggest this if reliability is more important that speed) the cable modems out there usually are just a bridge device and therefore you can use one ethernet port for the Cable modem and one ADSL card (or use an ethernet port for the dsl modem, but make sure to turn off NAT on the DSL modem/router and _route_ [not DMZ] all trafic to the real gateway/router/firewall box... don't ever double-NAT as it is hard to troubleshoot and causes all sorts of problems). When using two different providers you will only be able to do Layer 3 connection-based bonding.
Another method is to use a consumer router designed to provide layer 3 bonding and failover. The Linksys RV042 router supports these features, as well as QoS, VPN, etc.
If you just want to piss away money why not buy some US bonds?
What is running on the box? With GNU/Linux it can range from not all that difficult to quite complex.
Then there's always the option of getting something like a WRT54GL and loading OpenWRT on it and setting that up - which would be even more complex since you're then getting into vlan configurations for the ports and such.
Of course I didn't RTFA... why would I do that? You really are new here aren't you? Don't let my UID fool you.
Does anyone know of a tool I can use to leech all my neighbors wifi signals into one, mega-leet, super fat internet pipe? Thanks!
You might look at a company call sharedband ( http://www.sharedband.net ). It looks like they do this exact kind of thing, bonding cable/dsl/t1/etc lines into a single pipe providing increased speed AND redundancy.
sounds like they are pretty new and i can't find too many reviews on them but they look like they may be worth a shot
Why not go for wireless broadband - a HDSPA card along with your existing ADSL ISP. Wireless broadband only requires the configuration of a PPP script.
The network icon on your Gnome desktop allows you to dynamically switch between ISP's or Wi-Fi, Ethernet, Firewire and wireless modem cards.
The Draytek 2910 is a Dual WAN router so rather than having a computer booted up you can use a much less power hungry SOHO router. Don't know if you can route via both, but it definitely does failover.
I am NaN
The point is there's not a whole lot of interesting discussion around this topic. Router with 2 wan ports? Computer with multiple nics and a normal router? Pick your poison. It's the simplest of simple questions.
Ideas?
pfsense on cheap itx mobo with mikrotik routerboard 44G/pci. or two. CF card in CF/IDE slot adapter. I am happy with that. Don't forget an ups powering both router and adsl gateways. Just in case...There you are, staring at me again.
http://www.astrocorp.com/
The Astrocom box. I have one here at work for our 2 ISP's. It's like a FatPipe but much cheaper. Our was around 4 grand but I'm sure they have one for home users.
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
The point here is that maybe someone will take an interest in it that never thought of it before or cared enough to dig around Google.
Also, Google alone doesn't always get you the best answers. I know I've had a few problems where I Google for the solution, and find 50 different solutions with little grounds to compare them as to which is the best. Sometimes you'll find that most of the pages list a solution that's 5 years old, and then you find out later that there's a brand new solution that, for whatever reason, doesn't show up on Google's first 5 pages.
Google/Wikipedia a great sources of information, but it's often hard to find a place that has comparisons of the current incarnations of the leading solutions to a given problem. Maybe that'd be a good idea for a new Wiki-based site, but until that happens, "Ask Slashdot" is a pretty good place to get a variety of technical advice. There may be a bunch of dumb-asses on this site, but there are some seriously smart people too.
YES
I live in the Rockies on the western edge of a mountain ridge at 10k ft elevation - in other words a lightning magnet. I'm a full-time telecommuter for a multinational, & I work daily with people from 5 different time zones. Teleconferences, webex's etc. are my daily work life. Loss of connectivity to our source code repository can be a serious problem.
EVERY time there's lightning with 1/2 mile of here my phone & DSL go out. Last year I was out 7 different times for more than 24 hours. I lose track of the number of times I'm out for just a few hours.
I have a secondary ISP - WisperTel, a wireless WISP - that's a lot less reliable than DSL. Latency is bad, it's down a couple times a day at least, although usually for short periods.
To top it all off, I'm outside of cell phone coverage... and I have 3 DIFFERENT carriers. I'm only 1/2 mile to the nearest coverage, so I can drive or walk to make the necessary calls when both ISPs are down. This is fun when there's 3 ft of fresh snow on the ground, and it's -10F. Thank goodness for snowshoes... (Last year alone both were down at the same time 3 different times).
If I could also get cable here I probably would... although I do hate Comcast with a passion.
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
There are four main reasons that DSL goes down
I've had DSL fail four times in the last 10 years. One was my DSL router. Two were when phone company installers working on boxes down the street disconnected me by accident. One was a billing problem (but that was when my ISP was providing beta service, and they mixed up things between my home account and work lab, and I was customers #1 and #2 in the western half of the country :-) Some of these can cause both circuits to fail, some can't - and backhoe events are pretty rare. On the other hand, cable's more likely to have common failures than DSL is, unless you're one of those rare people with two cable providers, because there's more shared infrastructure between the two circuits.
Even so, I'd recommend going with two different providers because they're going to have different performance issues and probably different policies. If it won't interfere with your cable TV service, I'd recommend cable and DSL - cable's usually faster, though more likely to be flaky, and more likely to have obnoxious limitations on your service like not letting you run a web server at home or giving you 20 Mbps of download speed with a monthly download cap that limits you to an average of 50kbps if you use it 7x24. DSL is more likely to be reliable (because infrastructure gets fixed along with lifely telephone service as opposed to television), probably slower depending on your distance from the telco, and you usually have a choice of dozens or hundreds of ISPs if you don't like the policies or pricing your telco offers.
One obvious way to mix the two services is to have a DSL with a static IP address, and do most of your own downloading from the cable modem. You'll need some kind of router to deal with keeping track of the two services, and some kind of firewalling, so you probably want to use an OpenBSD to do that and whatever your favorite Linux, Mac, Windows, or game boxes behind it. (I'm picking OpenBSD because it's usually the best at security and firewalling and at least OK at routing, and you probably won't be putting anything requiring fancy hardware drivers on your firewall.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Are people's internet connections at home unreliable enough that two connections are desired? Hell, many businesses run their entire company web infrastructure on a single ISP link. Sure, an outage sucks. But you're not losing millions of dollars when the line goes down. You'll lose maybe an hour or two of torrent downloads.
I could *almost* see a case made for someone who works from home full time, but if internet connectivity is that critical, the company would probably pay for a dedicated connection. Maybe for someone running a business out of their house (especially a web site), a second line would be useful. I don't see any indication of either in the original question. A second connection is going to be another $50 a month. I can think of a dozen things I'd rather spend $50/mo on than a second internet connection.
Ok, technically I didn't ask first :-) But I can usually see 3-4 unlocked wireless systems from home, and while not all of them do everything I need (e.g. they block port 25), I've been able to borrow them the couple of times my DSL wasn't working.
I'm much more likely to borrow them by accident when something warps the local 2.4GHz wavelength or the electricity blips for a minute and my laptop gloms onto a neighbor's system instead of mine; I typically don't notice until I try to send mail from Eudora or can't get my work VPN to connect. I don't bother logging to find out if they've been borrowing mine; the only time I've been sure of it is when a neighbor's laptop got virused and started sending spam which my ISP blocked and called me about.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
In your situation, it's all about priorities. If it really was enough of a hassle for you to be where you are (i.e. where you call "home") then you'd probably up and move.
But if I had to hazard a guess, the view where you're at is breathtaking. And some small part of me doesn't fault you for that.
Karnal
Foremost IMO would be to stop using torrents. There are better and much safer ways to d/l than the evil torrents
Here's another pro-sumer level twin-wan router: http://www.xincom.com/twinwan.php
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
When I get this question, I usually suggest and f5 link controller ( http://www.f5.com/products/big-ip/product-modules/link-controller.html ) This is a pricy solution, but I would say it is best of breed for load balancing multiple internet links.
Bully for you if you don't find this discussion interesting. But you haven't even asked all the relevant general questions, much less the specific follow-up questions (e.g. which dual-WAN router). All questions seem simple when we see the world in black-and-white generalities.
Multiple WAN connections is something I've recently done myself and it is interesting to see how other people have/would solve the problem.
Not that you're interested, but others might be: My solution was not to load balance, but to use my existing shorewall firewall to split my connection. Instead, I use DSL for services, VoIP and some specific devices, but the bandwidth on DSL is relatively expensive, so I shove everything else up and down the cheap bandwidth of the cable line. Failover is a script that runs every 60 seconds to check if the connections are up or down and if so, switches the config and restarts shorewall.
Let's start at the bottom of the OSI stack - physical layer. The wires from your house to the telco office are usually physically separate until they hit the first active device, which might be a Subscriber Loop Carrier in a big green box down the road, but is more likely to be copper all the way to the telco office. They're bundled into bigger and bigger cables (e.g. 24-pair, 50-pair, etc.) There are common-mode failures here - backhoes, wet cables, cars crashing into the telco box - but one of the most common failure modes is "technician mistakes", which usually only take out one wire pair at a time.
At the telco office, your wires get connected to a DSLAM which provides Layer 2 service (DSL is usually ATM underneath.) If both ISPs are using telco DSLAMs, then it'll probably be the same DSLAM box, but if one of your ISPs is using Covad and the other one's using telco, then you're on different DSLAMs. Some DSLAMs have integrated routers, but back when I was working more directly with this stuff there'd typically be an ATM network connecting the DSLAM to some regional concentrator network. The ATM network might have common-mode failures such as port cards, but it's mostly carrier-grade equipment with diverse physical routing.
Eventually you get to a router for Layer 3 service. If your DSL provider uses a telco DSLAM and forces you to use PPPoE, there's a good chance that you're tunneled through a telco router, but eventually you'll hit a router actually managed by your DSL provider. And from there on out to the Internet backbone, everything's basically diverse.
I don't know how Verizon does FIOS - the fiber system's obviously diverse from the copper+DSLAM system, but there might be more common infrastructure upstream or they may use different tools to concentrate it (e.g. FIOS might be using routers while DSL might be on ATM.) If you're using Verizon DSL as opposed to a third-party ISP or an ISP using Covad, you'll probably hit the same Internet peering points, so you could be susceptible to problems like "Cogent decides to have a peering fight with Verizon this time", but on the other hand your ISP might have Verizon as their upstream provider so it's a bit hard to tell. That layer's certainly much more reliable than 10 years ago.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
pfSense is a BSD based router distribution. It has out of the box support for multiple WANs. It can do load balancing when both connections are up and fail over if there is an outage. I find DIY solutions based on Linux or BSD are more reliable than commercial products unless you spend a lot.
This solution will work with two ADSL lines and segregate traffic across them:
http://blog.angulosolido.pt/2008/03/intelligent-linux-gateway-multihoming_04.html
http://blog.angulosolido.pt/2008/03/intelligent-linux-gateway-bad-video.html
I use Shoreline Firewall (aka Shorewall) to do this for many of my medium sized business clients:
http://www.shorewall.net/MultiISP.html
A very modest freeBSD pc with a few spare NICs and running pfSense does this job nicely.
Someone posted above about doing DSL + Cable rather than trying DDSL+DSL or Cable+Cable. They are correct. Your phone company provides DSL. While there may be many "providers" out there, it's mostly going through the same gear. CLECs resell the telco DSL (usually at big markup) but the lines are the same, and you're going out through the same aggregator in most cases. This does not allow for failover, so going with DSL + Cable would yield the best results.
I've achieved this same effect with a freeBSD box and pfsense, using dialup in the event the DSL was down. Yeah, I could have bought a router, but what else am I going to do with that old AMD 350mhz in the closet? :P
look for the Linux Advance Routing Howto
Somewhere in that site it talks about some of the problems of having 2 IP addresses, like confusing game servers and the like, but with a bit of tweaking you could get it functional. I don't think this solution explicitly provides failover functionality, but I suppose that could be scripted in somehow.
pfsense is a nice turnkey solution for this too, if you're not into spending a couple weeks solid trying to make your debian or lfs distro act like a router.
db
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
To do this properly with load sharing and immediate failover, at the moment the professional solution would be that you should
- get business class connections and
- run BGP over both links.
If you don't already know what BGP is, this solution is probably too complicated for you. Worse, the global BGP routing table is a shared expense, and your extra route would impose a (slight) extra cost on literally every other ISP running BGP. (The business class connections are because you will need several static fully routable IP addresses to do this, plus run BGP, and that requires more than a consumer class connection.)
There is a lot of discussion at the moment about this at the IETF, and people are working on something called LISP (no relation to the computer language), which would provide true multi-homing without the bother of running BGP and adding to the global routing tables. Things like immediate failover and load balancing should follow more or less automatically.
There is a lot more information available at Lisp4.net. I have heard of some initial testing, but in my opinion this is still a ways from commercial use.
I recently set up a similar setup, but instead of load balancing across the two connections for everything, I needed to construct rules that decided if certain types of traffic (irc, http, etc.) went across which connections. If you choose to use any type of linux-based router, iproute2 will probably be what you'll be using, even if it is abstracted by some type of graphical tool. Consider the following links explaining iproute2:
The Linux Foundation's iproute2 page:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Iproute2
These guys seem to be maintaining iproute2 now.
The "Linux Advanced Routing & Traffic Control HOWTO": http://lartc.org/howto/
This is probably the most thorough document on iproute2 and will cover absolutely everything you would need to know about it.
Specifically, look into load balancing:
http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.loadshare.html
This excellent page also explains how to make iproute2 and iptables interact with each other, so you can use iptables rules to mark packets for iproute2 to route over a certain interface:
http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.netfilter.html
Finally, this document provides some basic information about how to manipulate rules with iproute2, which is useful if you're trying to diagnose why it's not working correctly:
http://www.policyrouting.org/iproute2-toc.html
s.clementmonkey@sympatico.ca, remove the 'monkey'.
However, what you are attempting is overkill. You could achieve the same results with business class service, and probably cheaper (than say Comcast + Verizon DSL).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
So Mr gayboy. You moan and bitch like a faggot that's not getting fisted enough, rather than link to something that would answer the question.
Bend over will you? See that soap needs picking up. Oooh, you love it so, don't you.
You can use mlppp for this. If I'm not mistaken, there's a mlppp patched tomato firmware for wrtg54g and the like.
Then I suggest you get Cisco 1801 with dual DSL WICs and get CEF to do both per-packet load balancing and failover in case of ISP outage. A good point was made in that you should rely on two separate technologies (DSL+Cable), in which case, replace one DSL WIC with a cable one (actually, I'm not sure if they exists so you might need to do ethernet). In any case, the nice thing about failover in this case is if you load enough RAM into the bitch, you can run BGP with your ISP and optimise reachability to remote subnets. I like linux, I use it heaps, but if diversity is the name of the game with these sorts of discussions then I'm also a big fan of the Cisco gear.
I have a Nexland Pro800Turbo that I use for this exact scenaio. They're hard to find these days as the company was purchased by Symantec a few years back, but they pop up on eBay every now and then.
Can't load balance hosted services without a remote router? Round robin DNS with short TTLs, with a script to remove an IP if a link goes down.
Outgoing TCP connections are OK when using Linux:
http://lartc.org/lartc.html#LARTC.RPDB.MULTIPLE-LINKS
If you buy an off the shelf solution from the likes of F5 there's even more control.
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
What? Nobody else suggested using your cellphone's 3G data via (bluetooth) tether? You would be surprised at how reliable and fast it can be. It's perfect in a pinch for a backup connection, I have found.
Openbsd + packet filter + "round-robin" rules = failover goodness. enjoy :-)
Slashdot articles aren't just posted for the question, but for the discussion. Yes, anyone can find an answer to anything they want with Google+Wikipedia+etc.
The problem is all the Asperger's retards on this site. If they just took two seconds not to jump to conclusions they wouldn't be such dicks.
It's just like when a layperson offers help when your machine isn't working: "Have you tried restarting". I'm sure that pisses off the Aspies. They just need to take some time to think before talking and saying something inappropriate/incorrect/weird.
If you're adventurous, DD-WRT is one of many linux firmwares that can run on several consumer routers http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Supported_Devices
Here's a forum thread with several scripts to allow you to do round robin load balancing with DD-WRT http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=13869&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=dual+wan+port&start=0
In your situation, it's all about priorities. If it really was enough of a hassle for you to be where you are (i.e. where you call "home") then you'd probably up and move.
But if I had to hazard a guess, the view where you're at is breathtaking. And some small part of me doesn't fault you for that.
The view is not breathtaking... but it's quite nice. I can see 4 different fourteeners from here. We're up here because my wife doesn't like serious heat, and I like the really clean air. Lots of people are scared by the temperature and snowfall amounts, but for whatever the physiological reason (lower air density, lower humidity) the winter just doesn't FEEL as cold as say Wisconsin or Minnesota. The snow, while deep, is super-light powder and is relatively easy to deal with.
Living here is a lot like camping in the mountains year-round. We pretty much quit camping after we moved here - no need, just go outside. We DO have to watch out for some of the wildlife - black bears & mountain lions are regulars around here. Deer & Elk wandering through the yard is cool. The very best part? There's no lawn to mow! Rocks, trees & wildflowers are about it.
The hassle isn't so bad - I deal with the ISP issue by having 2, as I said. Power reliability is a moderate issue too.
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
Border gateway protocol
Others have pointed at the Linksys RV series of Routers, I use the Netgear FVS 336G. It provides similar features, namely dual WAN connections at up to 100Mb, fail over of these ports or some load balancing. These solutions are far simpler to implement than hanging a server out into the Internet breeze, with all its ports naked to the wiles of every hacker on the planet, and trying to configure it as a router with, quite frankly quirky routing tables (yup, I tried that.)
These routers cost between $150 & $300, and provide lots of simple to configure security.
If you really want to have a safety system I reckon a cellphone (as mentioned by another poster earlier) is prehaps good enough. But if you want something with a bit more kick to it you could always go for a full on satelite rig, and hook your computer/network to an UPS with a generator as a backup system.
The Long Now Foundation
OK, so you have two routes to the internet. One packet departs, but is returned by the other route. How to glue those together is a very non-trivial problem.
Sprint tried that in 1997-2001 time frame with bonded T1 & T3 services. The bonding never worked for persistant connections, and only slightly better for transiant connections. UDP worked best. And that was using a routing system that understood it was bonded, not one completely unaware of another route.
These days $DAYJOB uses OC3's and SONET rings for Internet, so there may have been advances I'm unaware of, but back then, it really, really sucked. Off the cuff, I'd say use Linux and the Zebra package on a old computer, and try that, but no promises. Personally, I don't think it will work well.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
Oh knoes!!! The torrents have failed! Better get at&t, comcast, and verizon on the line.
Settings aside all the comments about providers, This is about the actual functionality. There are devices made by linksys for gaming, that allow for anwyhere from two to 16 INTERNET connections. Each is managed by it's own rules for latency and load. These work great for home users. If you got a little extra cash to throw around and want better QoS and priority, go with peplink. These devices range from small business(big consumer) to corporate enterprise and are the cream of the crop of consumer rolled load balancing/redundancy for your internet. I've used both and recomend both.
pfSense seems to have failover and is easy to setup on a headless pc (only need a Pentium-II with 128MB ram and strip out all non-essential drives, multiple user boot options from cd/floppy to USB thumb-drive choices will determine which stay).
For the backup WAN line... look for some pringles "cantenna" discussion on google search to create a wave-guide antenna (can be paired with a discarded satellite dish for more signal strength). then aim it at a friend's house several miles away with a duplicate receiver antenna and second pfSense box.
You're more likely to get a backup signal outside of your local dsl/cable spigot. Both you and your friend can share each other's broadband redundancy features for no "extra" cost.
For those trying to figure out "why do you want to do this"... The phone cable in my neighborhood has a bad connection on a few sets of wires... twice a year, every year for the ten years I've been here, when it's foggy and wet (fall/spring) the phones go staticy and neither dial-up nor DSL work until they switch your line. Then a few days later the neighbor calls to complain their line is no good (it's your old wires from two days prior since everyone was just swapped) and they switch them to another set. Comical, this goes on for days until the cable/junction box dries out and everyone is happy (I now know that when I return from work or errands and the phone truck is somewhere on the street that I had better plan on being out). The problem is Murphy is involved that you've got business to take care of - home based businesses for some, consulting clients for others - especially as fuel prices rise and more pressure to telecommute.
I under stand the use of redundancy and the costs of having routable IP addresses from more than one ISP it costs money. But the best solution that I can think of that's cost effective is to use a Dual WAN or Multi WAN device called a PePLink http://www.peplink.com/ This device allows you to use two or more internet connections at one time. The only draw back is you can't use them on top of each other, like if you were to get two blended T1's ( 1.544 + 1.544 = 3.088) at one time. Where the PeP link will let you use a type of QOS so you can set priories to one connection for downloading, maybe that Cable or FiOS connection, and then use the DSL or other connection for mostly everything else. It's got a nice fail over as well, so anyone just browsing the internet won't really notice a thing when one of the lines goes down.
You should never have to worry about a single point of falure, not even ISP's, Good luck and I hope this helps.
This is a Mac, what you have there is an embarrassment to your fellow computer users.
well, I guess this should work for you http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Dual-Homed_Gentoo_Server
I have this exact same setup in my house (student house with more than one nerd in it..). What I've done is simply to use a soft dialler for one connection (set the modem to have each client dial, instead of dialling on the modem itself) and set the other modem to do the dialling itself. This way, if you want connection one, you dial the software dialler, and if you want connection two you disconnect it. My (soft-dialled) ISP lets me have multiple dynamic IPs for no extra cost, but if yours doesn't, just enable "share this connection with other computers) (all major OSs have this) and run it on whichever computer you leave on most of the time.
XP comes with a soft-dialler (create a new connection in network connections), and I've had success with RP-PPPoE (Roaring-Penguin Point-To-Point Over Ethernet) on *nix systems. Can't speak for Apples, but I'd imagine that they would have something for dialling a PPPoE connection.
If you're wanting to use multiple connections SIMULTANEOUSLY - it's possible (on *nix systems), but difficult, and you have to modify every program to use the correct connection. It's much, much easier to use multiple (even virtual) machines, and run the program on the machine with the correct connection.
Its not free but its relatively cheap, runs on most x86 computers and is easy to setup. It can provide load balancing and failover with very little effort.
I produce a system that can do this. It's called Broadbond.
You can bond several ADSL lines, even from independent providers, and it will deliver the combined upstream and downstream bandwidth of the two. All traffic is load balanced across the two lines and can also be transparently compressed. The throughput of the lines is automatically measured to determine the optimal load balancing. Differences in latency on the two lines are compensated for.
The catch (there's always a catch!) is that you need to have a partnering system co-located with an ISP to handle the far end of the tunnel -- although I can also provide this if you would prefer.
The system is available as a software package that you can license to run on Linux or OpenBSD and also pre-installed and pre-configured on a couple of small embedded Linux boxes -- very low power (under 5W), no moving parts, good for up to 90Mbit/sec.
I bond two ADSL lines to my office, 4.4Mbit and 9.6Mbit, and I get around 13.5Mbit on file transfers.
If you're interested, contact me (details on the broadbond.org web page).
I have DSL and cable. I also have a D-Link DL604 load balancing router. It sucks.
The router seems to think that as long as the physical ethernet connection is up, the provider is up. It tends not to detect network failure. There are ways to set up a periodic monitor of some host to detect if the network is up, but it does not seem to work properly.
What I want from this thing is:
Lock SMTP to one port and thus one provider. My AT&T DSL SMTP server will not accept mail from my Comcast account. (this is correct behavior for anti-spam). The DL 604 does this correctly.
I want the router to send any new connection for a naive (not currently in routing table) external network to both providers. I want it to measure the response time ( over a number of packets ) and then lock the route to the network which provides the best performance. It can periodically re-test the routes - perhaps every 5 minutes or so. This should address the problem of non-neutral peering between various providers. It is not always true that the higher bandwidth cable connection is the best connection to where I want to go. If I am accessing a client's machine who is on AT&T DSL, my DSL connection may be faster than my cable connection. I want the router to deeply inspect the traffic and be able to detect if a session breaks on a particular WAN port, and try the other. I also want it to quickly recognize when all sessions on a particular WAN port break and switch to the alternate port, while testing the original port.
I want built-in diagnostics that can show me how often a provider drops the ball, shiny graphs of bandwidth and latency etc. It would be cool if the router would allow me to see what the instant connection graph between my LAN and external networks looks like. ( which of my hosts connect to which external domains at the moment ).
I would like to be able to see graphics of IP address / port scans.
I want the router to be able to do some intrusion prevention, particularly if no one is using my network at the moment - someone tries to scan - shut the thing off for a while. ( do I care if I DOS myself if I am not using the net? NO! )
There is a hardware provider http://www.routerboard.com/ that can provide multi-wan multi-lan and wireless router hardware for cheap. They also have software but nothing that does all the tricks I want...
Coders, here's a base spec, send some bits!
OZ
enough is too much
I doubt that you would be able to reliably fail-over. Most servers don't/won't/aren't configured to accept multiple IPs for a single connection. If something failed, you'd probably have to reset your connection anyway. Mind you, bittorrent would work.
Instead of land-based connections, you could always go for something like a cell-based adapter for your second connection. That way, if your land-based goes down, you can still go over-the-air on 3G or EVDO or whatever your carrier supports. Plus, you can take it with you and plug it into your laptop when your out of the house.
If you're just worried about torrents, why don't you just rent space on a LAMP server and install torrentflux? It could even be out of the country. That way, all your torrent activity happens on the server away from your ISP and other curious eyes, and when the torrents have been downloaded, its a simple, fast download from your server.
Another option for you would be satellite connectivity, a la HughesNet. It's expensive and the latency isn't great, but the virtue is that it doesn't share any local infrastructure with your other ISPs, except for the power system. Add a generator at your home, and you'd have zero common failure modes and very reliable connectivity overall.
Of course none of this is cheap, so you'll need to decide how much those 7 outages last year are worth to you.
http://linux-ip.net/html/adv-multi-internet.html
IOS supports unequal cost load balancing with various routing protocols like RIP. You can do per packet or per destination. You can get a used 3640 for fairly cheap and throw in a 4 port ethernet network module and use it as a WAN router. If you needed rendundancy, get a 2nd one and use HSRP. You'd also need at least 2 switches and have a trunk going from switch to switch as well as to both routers. Sounds complex but is really easy to implement with a little bit of networking and IOS knowledge. All the people recommending DSL + Cable are right, DSL + DSL = not redundant.
rtfm.
And then there was E
You will need a Dual Wan router. I use the LinkSys RV082. It has been working great for me for several (like 5) years.
I use a local wireless ISP for my primary WAN and www.starband.com for my secondary. It will fail over, but I also use protocol binding in the router so that all web traffic goes over the satellite and VOIP and email go over the wireless. Other traffic is load balanced.
It is an awesome router and starband is so reliable, I am never down.
Jamey
Jamey Kirby
I do have a good sized generator, enough to run the well and septic pumps, + the pellet stove (primary winter heat). Natural gas and city water are not available.
The first things said to me by the first dozen people I met when I moved here were "do you have a generator? Do you have a 10 day supply of food and water?, and a means to cook/heat without electricity?". I'm good for about a week, until I run out of generator fuel...
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
If I were you I would try to get a life instead of another ISP.
-- Cheers!
YES
Question asked, question answered.
And based on the additional information you've given I would suggest the following:
1) move. you aren't going to get reliable internet. if its that important: move.
2) if you don't want to move, look into 2 way satellite options. They will be slow and high lag.
3) given your are at 10k elevation, is there somewhere on your property with LOS to a more populated and reliable building?
You might want to try getting a long range directional wi-fi connection to a site within 'the city' or something. e.g. negotiate with a local church or business within LOS from your property for example, and install an antenna on their roof with a directional wireless link to your property; and pay the church a reasonable monthly rate to cover power, and put a little in their pocket to piggy back on their broadband connection. (or alternatively, you pay for it, and let them piggy back on yours...whatever)
Food for thought anyway, as its probably your best bet for reliable internet.
If you get a lot of rain with your lightning, you'll need to take that into account, of course, and purchase suitable antennae.
cheers!
Yes, I use 3 levels of redundancy for my home business:
1) Cable modem
2) EVDO over my phone as a modem (Sprint). If the power is out, there's a good chance it's localized (apartment, complex, or block) and at least one cell tower is up. Note that this requires a charged laptop and eventually a UPS or other battery... or
3) Starbucks. Wifi is cheap (I have an OLPC T-Mobile plan), and they have outlets.
Note that plans 2 and 3 assume your work is on a laptop - if you've been working on a desktop while things are fine, you're pretty screwed when they aren't.
These boxes work very well. You can set either your EVDO/GPRS(EDGE) card as the primary or the backup. Unlimited plans (even if capped at 5GB) are generally anywhere from $20 to $60 a month. If you're okay with paying that as a backup, you should do fine.
From what I have read, OpenWRT supports these devices and would allow you to use either EVDO or a GPRS/EDGE card. Otherwise, you are stuck with the limited support set in a single device per technology. That is, the -ST is EVDO (Sprint) and the -AT is GPRS/3G (AT&T.) The hardware is identical in both, with the exception of the firmware loader which looks for specific headers. There are hacks to make both firmwares work on a single device, if you like hacks.
For load-balancing, there are a number of dual-WAN routers on the market. I am familiar with a couple of Netopia units which allow both WAN fail-over and balancing. The links are not bound, which means your download speed is limited by the capacity of whichever pipe gets your download.
Load-balancing and fail-over can be a problem if you are expecting incoming traffic (web serving, etc.), as each pipe will have a different IP address. It may be possible to mitigate this using a dynamic DNS approach, but you are still bound to run into issues, even if only temporary.
Then there is always dial-up. Nine times out of 10, a DSL outage does not mean the POTS is down. So if you are okay cruising at 56k on a good USRobotics Courier until DSL comes back up, you will be hard pressed to find a modern consumer-grade OTS router which supports this. Several of the WRT54G models have provisions for a serial port, but I have not been able to determine if any open source router firmware supports dial-out.
I have been using my trusty SMC Barricade 7008ABR for many years now over DSL (and cable for a VERY short time -- I despise ComCast) with a 56k dial-up for fail-over. I tested it with a Sony Ericsson T637 (GPRS) over serial connection, but the cable (or the phone) is apparently missing a signal the Barricade requires (CTS, perhaps, I never dug into this) and refuses to dial. The biggest draw-back to this particular setup is the required use of TZO's dynamic DNS service, which is $25/yr, rather than a free or custom DNS service like DynDNS.
Right, then. That is all I have.
I have AT&T DSL and Time Warner Road Runner @ home myself. I like it because the connection from Time Warner is blazing fast, and my DSL from AT&T has never gone down in over 5 years. After messing around with several "dual wan" routers I finally found one that is far better than most big brands (netgear, dlink, linksys, etc). It is made by a company called Xincom and the particular model I use is the XC-DPG503. Highly recommended, www.xincom.com
I am using a Netgear FVS124G to connect my LAN to one cable and one DSL line. It has three settings:
1. Use one "WAN" input at a time; no fail-over.
2. Use one "WAN" input at a time; with fail-over.
3. Load-balancing mode.
It all seems fine and dandy in theory, but in practice it's not so hot. If I had time to do it over again, and could justify shelving yet another piece of valuable equipment, I would not go with the simple "one box, no muss, no fuss" method. The Netgear is the latest of three appliance-style Internet access devices that I have that allow two or more connections. Although it's the best so far, it is still lacking. It's just not smart enough to do any useful load balancing.
I will assume that the matter of bonding is already understood, and go right to why there's not much performance to be gained by using separate, non-bonded channels to the Internet. Bonding, of course, makes two separate physical connections into a single functional one. But it requires cooperation at both ends, so your ISP must offer bonding. But if the goal is to have a more robust connection, it makes little sense to use the same ISP, and therefore the same path.
If you have two DSL lines, and the trunk line going to your home gets sliced apart by a careless backhoe operator, you've lost both lines. The chances of getting a second DSL line running from your home to the CO by a different path (or even better, to a different CO) are just about nil. If you had the pull to make something like that happen, you wouldn't be here asking, because you'd already be well taken care-of. It's pretty much the same story with cable, although the topology varies more than with telco copper.
If you think that turning on that "RIP" feature on your appliance is going to do anything good, forget about it. RIP is an ancient routing protocol that cannot scale to Internet size. And your ISP isn't going to give a home customer access to its Internet routing protocols, so you can forget about even trying that. The best thing to do is leave it, and every other useless thing that might broadcast or answer back over the Internet, off for the sake of security.
Having said that, RIP may well be the answer, as long as it is used inside of your home LAN. Unfortunately I have yet to see a retail product that offers any configuration for RIP on the device, which makes it pretty useless to have in general. That means rolling your own Internet interface devices, which is precisely what any decent /. reader is going to do in the first place. :)
Almost everyone has an obsolete PC laying around, that can be pressed into service as an Internet router, firewall etc. Chances are good that that old PC also has a lot more CPU and RAM than any new store-bought appliance does. All you need to do is load your OS of choice and the appropriate application software, configure it, and go to town. For two ISP connections, you'll need two old computers (at least). If you configure correctly, each machine will broadcast packets on your LAN, telling whether or not it can route traffic to the 0.0.0.0 network. That's all you need for redundancy.
If you have only a couple of client computers, you may be able to configure RIP on each computer to figure out which box to use as the gateway at any given time. OTOH if you have a small data center, multiple workstations and/or appliances that use the Internet (like a TiVo or Internet radio devices), then you can save yourself a lot of headaches by finding a third box, an old Ethernet hub or switch, and building a DMZ.
Although you can use your DMZ for traditional purposes, I'm using it in a dual-homed setup only to funnel the two Internet connections into a single IP address, for those machines that just don't do dynamic routing (like a TiVo, or Internet radio device). In this case, the third box only needs to provide that one IP address for your LAN. But there's so much more that can be done!
Somebody will say that my
End-user multihoming with two ISPs (assuming you're using Cisco router): http://www.nil.com/ipcorner/SmallSiteMultiHoming/ End-user multihoming with public servers: http://www.nil.com/ipcorner/SOHO_Servers/ End-user multihoming with more reliability (two routers): http://www.nil.com/ipcorner/RedundantMultiHoming/
I love the dead peace and quiet here. It's so quiet I can carry on a normal-tone conversation with my nearest neighbor across the road, about 250m away.
My 2nd ISP is already a WiMAX connection to a mountain top about 8 miles to my SE, which service I pay for, $30/mo for 1.5M; 5M is available. I believe that to be connected via landline to somewhere upstream (although it could be cascaded wireless, I don't actually know). The antenna + radiomodem unit actually came with the house.
My nearest neighbor is within wifi cantenna range, but he's also DSL, and each and every time mine goes out, his is out too. Durned lightning... there is a QWest truck on my road practically every day. They can't possibly be making out money here, they replace those cards for one line or another almost daily. The various techs have told me they're $200 ea...
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
So why is everyone reccomending ADSL?? I thougt ADSL was utterly redundant - like 56K modem connections. For that same price I get a reliable 3G modem connection (about & around 10mbps 24/7). With the additional advantage of being a portable solution (plugin to laptop and go travel),
As others said, use a linux box as a gateway, using two different ip addresses (one on two interfaces or two on a single one), use squid as a proxy, and split the requests using the 'tcp_outgoing_address' with ACLs like:
acl even_numbers urlpath_regex [02468][^0-9]*$
acl odd_numbers urlpath_regex [13579][^0-9]*$
tcp_outgoing_address 192.168.0.2 even_numbers
tcp_outgoing_address 192.168.1.2 odd_numbers
where the examples 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.1.2 ip addresses are routed through the two different routes. This example would route even numbered and odd numbered URLs to the two routes. It's a quick example.
This wouldn't do much for fail-over, though, or for non-webbrowsing connections. For that, you would need a connectivity-checking mechanism (a python script could do that) of the two separate routes, and then issue relevant tc/ip commands, but for that, I trust sb else will cover the issue.
I speak England very best
wow, is the internet really this important if you are in an earthquake/thunderstorm/hurricane?
I have worked in a few ISPs (in the UK) and your question shows more thought about the reliability of your internet connection than any small-business person I've ever come across shows. When their ADSL connection fails we'd get it in the neck, "We're losing thousands of pounds a day and it's your fault!" Erm. You worry about your cashflow but not your source of income?
My advice is the following: most times, to know the possibility is there is enough. If you absolutely must have some sort of connection then usually (small business) people consider email their primary concern and everything else secondary. There are plenty of options scattered through other people's comments: 1) buy a dual-WAN router 2) buy one with 3G/EDGE/HDSPA/GPRS/ISDN/56k backup; 3) make your own; 4) use someone else's wifi; 5) go somewhere with wifi; 6) buy a connection with a SLA; 7) do without.
At my last ISP (Zen), we had enough calls about this sort of issue that we started collecting information about solutions. I started making a point of informing customers about the reliability of ADSL and the process for fixing their connection (if they specifically asked or their connection was flakey). I have a big chip on my shoulder over people who don't think ahead a little bit and don't help themselves when things go wrong, especially if they try pinning the blame on me.
Then choose DSL and cable, or DSL and fibre, etc. If you choose two DSL providers, it is extremely likely that both circuits will end up in the same CO (central office) and may even be on the same DSLAM (the DSL "interface" at the CO). If that device fails, or there's a problem at the CO, you're off the 'net on both links.
On FreeBSD - http://www.taosecurity.com/bond.txt
#!/bin/sh
# I believe I originally heard of this here:
# http://seclists.org/lists/focus-ids/2003/Oct/0028.html
kldload ng_ether
ifconfig fxp1 promisc -arp up
ifconfig fxp2 promisc -arp up
ngctl mkpeer . eiface hook ether
ngctl mkpeer ngeth0: one2many lower one
ngctl connect fxp1: ngeth0:lower lower many0
ngctl connect fxp2: ngeth0:lower lower many1
ifconfig ngeth0 -arp up
OpenBSD has it also
http://geek00l.blogspot.com/2005/12/bond-interface-for-openbsd.html
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
....sure there are some naive fantasies about wonderful things happening, but all you get is 2x the cost, and 4x the headaches.
-Styopa
If you have a box external to your home connection you can set up a tunnel through each source (vtun, openvpn, ...) with pretty much any tunneling program that gives you a tap/tun endpoint. Then just use normal linux bonding of those virtual ethernets and you'll get full load balancing and proper removal/add as connections get lost/restored without having to do anything exotic or using routing protocols lik bgp. It works best with pipes of the same size since it does seem to limit to n*slowest. I'm using this method currently to bond 3 1.5mb/s DSL link and absolutely love it. The same thing could be applied to cable/DSL but the speed over the bond would be limited by the slower of the two. The other nice thing about doing it this way is you can have the same ip from the outsides point of view because the external box can set that ip via masquerade when it comes out of the bond or the bond itself can have a real ip.
I run 2x 24Mbit dsl lines and 2x 10mbit cable lines and balance my traffic across them using pf.
pass in on $int_if from any to !$lan_net route to ($ext_if1 $ext_gw1, $ext_if2 $ext_gw2)Doing this is very well documented. For example
and then you'd need a sanity rule that says 'only send traffic out on interface 1 if it's from interface 1.
You can't add weight as easily with pf as you can with iptables. You might want to look at a commercial product called BalanceNG which runs on linux and SunOS, and you can get a free license for non-commercial applications.
The only issue I have with pf is some sites that base your session upon IP don't work very well, but you can easily drop that sites IP into a table that says to force your traffic out over that specific IP.
OpenBSD + ifstated + pf
this is something i have been doing for years, at one point for a LAN part we had 8 Cable modems and 3 DSL lines...
well if u want to do REAL load balancing ... then the fun starts >: D
you need to get a real router (software zebra?)
and a public ip space-class. furthermore
your isp needs to add you to their routing
table
but a simple solution is with "man ip" ...
on linux and read about setting up two default
gateways which you can weight
All my electronic equipment is on six 1500VA APC battery UPS boxes, and I have a 17KW/~70 amp Kohler standby backup generator which runs on natural gas (start-up and switchover time is less than 10 seconds). The backup generator has kicked in several times this year. When you DO need electric power, a standby generator is really, really nice. Since I work at home (no gasoline commuting expenses!) and all my work is done on computers, the investment (and a business deduction) is well worth while. The last outage here was a couple weeks ago and lasted almost 11 hours.
This thread is VERY helpful to me precisely because redundant ISPs was on my mind. I have a business cable connection. I think I'll go for DSL and a XiNCOM or Linksys to tie them in together.
I've thought about this kind of setup; would be very useful for where and how I use my laptops. I have access to 3G, Wi-Fi and other networks.
HOWEVER, these are a combination of proxied and un-proxied links. Load balancing will not work on proxied links, unless I'm wrong and there is some trick you can make Squid do to do proxy-level load balancing?
I spent a bit of time working on this issue when I was at "a freakin large router company". Large customers deal with this by setting themselves up peering agreements ISPs and using BGP to do load balancing. Great stuff, but not so scalable for home users...
Have a look at this: http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps6628/products_ios_protocol_option_home.html It has the ability to probe path characteristics passively or actively and intelligently route traffic based on it. It will run on a Cisco 1800 series router, so pick up an 1801 (with built in DSL interface), use an Ethernet interface to talk to the modem for the other service, and off you go. Kinda spendy, but it's the cheapest solution that has this level of intelligence.
Even if they're from different providers, they're running over the same phone network (esp. since smaller providers are just resellers). A backhoe, lightning storm, or major power blackout doesn't give a sh*t that you went through two different providers
There are a few sides to this coin.
Side 1: If ISPs get wind of the idea that people are (a) concerned about reliability and (b) building their own failovers, ISPs can keep even lower standards for service because that will (c) sell more connections and (d) save money. Businesses are catching on to the phenomenon of "people will pay more if they think they need more". Oil is a good example. OPEC is now saying _we_ can't control the price of oil. How can _we_ have anything to do with it? Well, if I bring to OPEC 10 empty barrels and say "Here's a $140 US. Turn on the taps." So it happens, the taps will come on briefly and close when one barrel is filled. OPEC has so much oil that if brought 10 swimming pools, and they filled them, they could care less but they wouldn't give so much as a squirt in the other 9 barrels. It's all about businesspeople taking what they can, if we so much as hint that we don't mind.
Side 2: Consumers giving pressure to ISPs by switching to the ISP that offers more speed and reliability, and none of the claptrap about long-term contracts. The price difference between the highest speed and the medium speed is very little, so how much gain is there in subscribing to two accounts? Also, if the backbone can support two or n accounts at the highest modem speed, why do we not have modems that are even faster for just a bit more charge?
Side 3: If many households are so hungry for bandwidth that they need more than one channel, they are likely to be downloading multiple items at once much of the time. The architecture of the Internet is inefficient for such traffic because it means, for popular things, the same thing is being downloaded again and again from a server. Instead, the most popular things should be automatically mirrored to be within range of a wireless connection.
Side 4: What's the next level up from ADSL? If someone wants 2 or n ADSL connections, maybe it's just as costly as going to the next level, which is sure to provide more service.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
OpenBSD and PF http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/ makes for a pretty mean router/firewall. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PF_(firewall)
I was always under the impression that running all that on your firewall was poor security practice.
It's a great piece of software, great community, you can't go wrong.
As well as the comments about doing DSL + Cable, read the fine print from both ISPs. I don't know what the case is elsewhere in the world, but in Australia, where I am, most ISPs have a clause excluding you from connecting a LAN between two separate ISPs. (Usually worded along the lines of not allowing "servers" or "connections to remote networks" behind the connection to the ISP.)
The Japanese definition of "rural" is nowhere near the definition of rural here in the US. this is because they have an ungodly amount of people for the land they inhabit.
Basically, what I am saying is the Japanese idea of rural is, at best, like a marginally populated suburban neighborhood in the US.
Here are some raw numbers to better illustrate my point (from this study, year 2000 numbers):
Japan total rural area (sq km): 273,646
Japan total rural population: 13,498,527
Japan rural population density (people/sq km): 49.32
US total rural area (sq km): 8,423,867
US total rural population: 54,936,968
US rural population density (people/sq km): 6.52
SEE THE DIFFERENCE? It's almost an order of magnitude! And the urban numebrs show a 3x difference between the US and Japan; closer, but still nowhere near each other.
Of course we have infrastructure problesm here in then US, and they largely don't; it just comes with the territory.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Just so you know, I was going to have bad thoughts about you, until I got the the sentence where you work at home. The rest is understandable in that event.
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If you really want to confuse someone... talk about service 8x5 or 10x5 -- not many people (/.'er excepted) actually understand what 24x7 really means. There are lots of service options that only offer 8x5 (normal business hours) or 10x6 (extended hours).
In the auto world everyone talks about 4x4 -- without really knowing what it means; your normal sedan is a 2x4 (two driving wheels, 4 total); other options are 4x6, etc.
Non-technical people should not attempt to speak tech without a translator/editor.
I only gas up my car every 3 to 5 weeks. I'm almost 60 years old and don't go out often other than for groceries (got past the bar scenes and all that years ago). I live simply in a 1100 sq foot 2 bedroom bungalo. My lady friend stops by 3 nights a week and we cook dinner here (we rarely go out to eat, as I'm a pretty good cook). I conduct *almost* all my business from here and love it. I use WebEx a lot to interface with clients on projects. I keep a few web sites online (both here at home and on server farms) and monitor them closely. I used to travel extensively, but I technically retired about 8 years ago. I have a very small energy footprint, down to the best insulated windows and doors I could buy and 20" of insulation in the attic, Mitsubishi Mr. Slim super efficient AC and electric heat (I put those in about 16 months ago). And whilst I have a standby generator, I'm not an apocalypse nut. I don't even own a gun. I do keep at least a week of food in during the winter in case a serious snow storm hits and I can't get out.
That might help clarify why I want (need?) to be 'connected' to the internet and have reliable electricity 24/7/365. The only thing I have a current need for is ISP redundancy which I have been thinking about because about a month ago my RoadRunner business line would not connect to a server I was monitoring. When I contacted the RR people, they could connect but could not tell my why I could not connect. It was a level 3 router issue they said. They said they could route around it there but they couldn't set anything up for me. It lasted about 3 days during which I had to use a dialup to connect to that one server. That's why this discussion thread interested me. I can get ADSL here so I'll probably do that and get a Red Brick or Linksys or something like that.
Well, back to monitoring a forum on one of my servers. Sunday isn't a day off for me...
wow, it sounds like you've got an excellent setup for a home business. Do you do mostly consulting, or are you a contractor for specialized projects?
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I'm a retired business systems (operations, not computer focused) consultant. I still do some consulting and contracting and 'odd jobs'. Everything I do is company specific so I guess the closest is 'specialized projects'. The only time I leave here is when I absolutely, have to be at a client site. I'll be gone the last week of July - San Francisco area - for a week. Actually August will be a 'full' month as I'll be gone 3 weeks (counting that last week in July) - San Francisco/Santa Cruz for a week, then a week home, then New York for 4 days then Boston for a week. But that's unusual. I'm rarely gone more than a week a month, if that. Most months I don't leave at all. When I have to travel my lady friend stays here evenings and monitors everything for me (which I pay her for - it's a business expense), but even then I VPN back to my main computer here and work off of it. If something starts happening (like a database starts throwing errors, or a server decides to freeze or otherwise go offline), emails hit my cell phone, so I just VPN in and see what the problem is and work on it. I take a cheap PC with me when I travel, so if it's lost or stolen it's not a problem.
I've been planning for quite a while, starting renovations of the bungalo about 3 years ago. I use 60% less energy now than I did prior to the renovations, so electric can go up quite a bit before I start getting hit, so to speak.
I know I can't plan for every potential 'event', but short of a direct hit by a tornado (or an earthquake which are extremely rare where I live - southern Ohio) I'm relatively well covered. I even have a functioning cistern. I do have and use city water, but if that goes out I flip one water transfer valve and I'm on filtered cistern water (the cistern was here when I bought the house which was built before there was city water or sewer in the area). I have a small distiller with capacity to distill 10 gallons a day for drinking and cooking.
I guess the point is we all have different circumstances and reasons for what we do. I lucked into what I do and even with the economy going to heck I do quite well. But, I do live very simply and cheaply. The only time I feel 'guilty' about my carbon footprint is when I travel. It never ceases to amaze me how much energy businesses and homes totally waste.
If you want to see where I live, including the house layout, go to cheechwiz.com/page_1.html I don't keep that site updated any longer, but the house exterior picture and layout are pretty much the same now.
Ideally, you'd want two routers, each connected to both WAN points and each other, at least two PCs, and for each computer to have a separate phsyical network connection to each router box.
This isn't as silly as it sounds, if the PCs are laptops or have cheap wireless cards, and the routers also have wireless (or are multiplexed to a pair of WAPs).
If you want really silly, have two or more separate servers running a single failoverable multiprocessor session across them, and use the PCs as simple remote terminals to the session. That way, even if a PC explodes in the middle of a complex bit of work, the other PC can pick up the same session without any data loss.
Make sure to have multiple physical RAID servers for storage. And a UPS which can run everything, in case the broken component turns out to be the grid power supply. Which probably means that you'd want at least one of the WAN links to be satellite...
Wow, that's a heck of a setup.
My friend is a test engineer who deals with a lot of the same things I see on your site. I'll send him the URL as well. Thanks a lot!
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look at a company called FatPipe. They had a suite for combining separate lines into one 'fat pipe'. There was fail-over, intellitgent queue scheduling and more.
Full disclosure: I worked for them several years ago.
My cellular (AT&T) sees more like 1.2+ Mbps down, regularly. Occasional high latency and dropped packets, but pretty reliable as far as availability and uptime. Uploading is around 400 Kbps. These are similar statistics to EVDO-RevA (Sprint) and WiMax (Clearwire). Many devices being sold now are capable of 3.6 or 7.2 Mbps once the network supports it.
At ~$60/mo. for 'unlimited' computer (not just phone/PDA) access, it may be an option. Note that providers have cut off customers for 'bandwidth abuse' despite being 'unlimited', so take care to choose the provider that best fits your location and situation.
If I had a sig, this is where it would be.
Actually, that's not true. My friend looked up just for 1 split second, and then the next thing I knew, he smashed his car. He's dead, and I'm paralysed below the waist.
--
Said with sincerity and thanks.
You're... welcome?
Slow Down Cowboy!
Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 59 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment
OMGWTF?!
Now I'm just curious how long I have to delay posting as AC. I might be better off logging in at another computer without my cookie. Will it exceed one posting per hour?
I have a Sprint EVDO card and a Linksys router that accepts the card.
The router has a WAN port, and will accept a connection from my other ISP (cable) ... if the cable fails it will use the Sprint connection. It's a cheap solution, I paid $150 for the router on ebay, $100 for the card and $60/mo for Sprint plus $45 for cable... for $250 up front and $105/mo I have a very resilient connection at home .
My setup is simple fail-over, but I would imagine that using a hacked up DD-WRT or similar router that accepts PC Card or USB cellular WAN connections you'd be able to setup some rough traffic routing etc if you needed (beware the typical 5GB monthly cap on the cell connections)
I think the cellular cards are perfect because they provide DSL-like speeds and are not susceptible to very local disturbance (like a pole in your neighborhood getting hit by a truck, or falling branch in a storm) -- so you can literally be disconnected physically from the world for as long as your local power holds out and the towers stay up (this is sometimes hit-or-miss, especially in an extended city/regional power outage ... where I used to live across town the closest tower apparently had no backup, so a power failure meant nearly complete loss of cell signal, but at my new location this hasn't been an issue in the handful of power outages I've had)