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Affordably Aggregating ISP Connections?
An anonymous reader writes "Has anyone setup a system to aggregate multiple ISP connections to form a high bandwidth site-to-site link? Load Sharing SCTP looked interesting, but it doesn't look like it has been widely adopted. Multi-Link PPP appears to be more widely supported for clients, but I can't find any good guides for setting up both sides of the connection for a site-to-site link. The hardware solutions I've found are expensive for a small business. Does anyone have experience using hardware solutions from Mushroom Networks (Virtual Leased Line, p2 of this document), Ecessa (site-to-Site Channel Bonding), or others?"
The hardware solutions I've found are expensive for a small business.
And leasing the line is too if you want multiple ISP's on it. One is easy, after that it gets hard.
If you want something fail-proof, just go for co-location in an established datacenter with many peers.
The more interesting question here is that if someone has done *peering* outside of major datacenters? It's of course costly, but it's something the submitter is looking for.
I have bonded 2 IPSec VPNs running over 2 ISP's to create a bigger (and cheaper) site-to-site link on the cheap.
http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/faq/vpn/
Read Point 5 in the link
What you have presented us with here is a "B C" problem. You want to achieve C, so you ask us how to do B. Unfortunately, you never specify what A is, so the best we can do is give you some pointers for B which are probably going to be irrelevant and useless to what you are really trying to achieve.
Most of the comments will probably be about trying to figure out what your A problem is. To that end, why don't you just get a faster line in the first place and forget about this line aggregation stuff you're asking about?
We've been using 2 Powerlinks from Ecessa (back when they were Astrocom). They work really well, and the price is tough to beat. We have one in our Dallas branch (with a T1 and business cable ISP) and one at our home office in Baton Rouge (a dual bonded T1 and business cable). They are channel bonded with each other, so the site-to-site VPN is more stable. They made my life a lot easier!
All of them?
Um, yeah: Whatever you say, kid.
We usually just use a Roadrunner account for the main office, just like all the other small business out there. It's faster and cheaper than a T1, and has better reliability than the PRI that handles our phones. (We also have a freebie account with a local WISP that we do some business with for manual fail-over, but we haven't had to use it in years.)
Kid-proof tablet..
When I first read it, I thought he was talking about connecting two offices together securely. Of course, I also hadn't considered that we here in Chicago tend to spend more money than people in other areas, either.
The cheapest way to do this is use the mlppp version of tomato on a wrt type router. You can check it out here: http://fixppp.org/
Unless you can get your ISP to bond several connections together about the best you can do is load balancing across multiple connections. I use pfsense (http://www.pfsense.com) as my router/firewall VPN solution that's free, you only supply the hardware to run it on. with it you can load balance and fail over to 2 or more connections automatically. Specif connections can even be setup to have certain traffic routed over them while all other traffic gets load balanced round robin style. there are of course other free *nix distros out there that will let you do the same type of stuff however I and many others have found pfSense to be far batter than most. AW
You didn't give us enough info, but it sounds like you want to aggregate multiple connections from *multiple ISPs*. Which isn't really possible. Not like you want. You can achieve *failover*, but not aggregation.
Basically, you need to read a fucking book on how routing works.
http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/nano.txt
At first glance I read "affordably aggravating ISP connections". As in respectably annoying without breaking the bank.
Failsafe (http://failsafe.ca) My own tunneling system, which operates at the IP layer (and so doesn't care what the underlying links are), will provide both aggregation and redundancy using multiple links between sites.
Other options in the Linux world are Zero Shell and Vyatta. You can aggregate Internet connections and also have failover capabilities.
HMH
Have you looked at what Talari Networks (http://talari.com/) is doing? I'm pretty sure their products do EXACTLY what you're talking about. Might be pricy for you, but it should do the trick.
Your local newspaper or medium sized printer will have such a setup. Buy their IT staff diner to get the information..
Fred Grott(aka shareme) http://mobilebytes.wordpress.com
I had an idea for how to do this - has anyone tried using a HTTP proxy, and having it split up large downloads across multiple HTTP range requests, each going out of a separate WAN connection?
In other words, given N connections to the internet: Small requests are load balanced by simply doing round-robin. When the response starts coming in, if the object size is more than say 10MB, the proxy goes and issues N-1 additional range requests across each of the other WAN connections for equal sized chunks (or sized in proportion to the speed of each link, if they're different speeds).
And this could be done a lot better with some additions to the HTTP protocol. A "stride" parameter for example...
Of course it is not trivial but I think for static objects it is imminently feasible.
In theory, you can bond multiple DSL, multiple cable, multiple T1, or even multiple dialup connections from the same vendor.
Even if you are in a small town where the best service you can get is 1Mbps DSL, if you've got enough wires running from the neighborhood box to your house you can ask for 2 or 3 or more separate DSL lines and see if the local telco will support bonding them.
Even 15 years ago some telcos offered on-demand, 0-24 circuit, bonded dialup. The idea was a business would use it as up to 24 voice circuits during times of the day they talked a lot and up to 24 modem/data circuits when they needed them, typically at night for batch data exchange. It was sold as an alternative to T1 or ISDN, the first of which was very expensive and not available in all areas, and the latter of which was expensive and roughly the equivalent of 2 phone-or-data lines.
DSL and later cable internet made this pretty much obsolete, at least in technically advanced areas.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I read your comment as "of a tomato on a wrt typewriter."
Shades of 1909.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
The higher end dreytek business modems support at least two aggregate DSL links. The real question is, do you want a wider pipe, or a faster pipe. One is easy, the other not so easy. Bigger trucks in your tubes, or faster trucks in your tubes :)
(sorry couldnt resist that analogy)
www.sharedband.com
Bonds both Up and Down stream.
Layer 3 so you don't have to bother your ISP.
I have seen people bond FiOSS with DSL and Cable modems.
Sold directly or through your ISP if they offer the service.
Reliable and very cost effective.
Keeps your ISP honest.
Cheers
Just get one of the commercial multi wan routers and jam a bunch of connections into them. It's not true link aggregation but it's as affordable as it can get. It won't become one giant pipe, instead the connections from machines behind the router will get load balanced out. In order to get true link aggregation, well, it's horribly expensive and I'm almost positive that it can't be done with multiple ISPs.
See the following sites:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Bonding
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1238308
That should give you a good start.
Huh? [devShell.org]
What people presume to know, sheesh! Bandwidth Aggregation: Combining Internet Connections to Incrementally Increase Bandwidth Capacity Bandwidth aggregation combines two or more Internet connections and gives Internet applications access to their total available bandwidth and increases reliability with link redundancy. PowerLink, ShieldLink and ClariLink bandwidth aggregation techniques (also known as multi-homing) support load balancing to route Internet sessions from congested links, to links with more available bandwidth. They also provide automatic failover of Internet sessions from failed links to functional connections to eliminate the Internet as a point of failure. http://www.ecessa.com/pages/solutions/solutions_technology_bandwidth.php
Wired has an article on Willie Nelson's setup in his tour bus running, http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/willie-nelson-broadban/ "Willie Nelson has tossed the satellite dish off the back of his corn-powered tour bus in favor of a little box that fuses wireless data cards from a variety of networks into a single connection."[Mushroom Networks PortaBella 141]
What exactly are you trying to achieve? .2) something repeatable for multiple remotes
Some scenarios:
A) remote to central with 2 ISP's at remote with "cheap regular" DSL type connection going to central where there is a "big fat pipe" (multihomed?)
A.1) a one of for a single remote
B) remote to central with 2 ISP's as A) and with (same?) 2 ISP's at central (also B.1 & B.2) as above).
Do we have any fixed public IP addresses anywhere in the equation (or is this out of budget too)?
In all cases in which direction is the data flowing mainly?
Also, what is the purpose mainly here? Getting higher speed? Higher redundancy? Less latency (hah!) ?
> The hardware solutions I've found are expensive for a small business
Can you define expensive, what type of price is out of it (both for hardware and for links)?
I would GUESS that the end result needed is to connect LAN-1 to LAN-2 , so it doesn't HAVE to "look" as a single channel for the routers involved, just that the paths
aggregate and are redundant... But a bit more information would be appreciated!
I think it can do multi-WAN...
Sounds like you're trying to take a DSL, cable, and possibly a T1 or other technology and trunk them for combined throughput. That isn't possible because you'd have packets in the same stream taking different routes and TCP/IP doesn't allow for that, that I know of. I don't think any technology allows for that. For example an 8mbit DSL, 6mbit cable, and a T1 can't be combined to make a 15.5mbit connection. I suppose the same would be true if you were wirelessly connected to multiple networks.
You can, however, use all three gateways independently with a variety of load balancing software so that when a new request is made from any host it is routed through the gateway with both the quickest response time and the most bandwidth available. I'll let you look that up on your own - there are lots of free options. The problem is that the load balancer needs to be smart enough to not fuck up your active sessions. If you were communicating with a host via one route, went idle for a bit but didn't end the session, then sent more data via another route the host on the other end will most likely (if written correctly) not accept your new packets.
The way we handled it at "The Geek House" with three internet gateways was to just permanently assign gateways based on the role of the host, and made sure not too many were on the slower gateways. It's not perfect, and certainly could have been geekier, but it worked and we didn't have to worry about shit breaking in the middle of a frag fest. And if one gateway was down the hosts configured with that gateway just had to change their gateway.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
It's got everything you'll need for Multi-WAN load balancing and failover, and supports many platforms.
pfSense Multi WAN / Load Balancing
If you want to enhance single-flow performance, then MLPPP or round-robin per-packet balancing is what you'd want, but would require the cooperation of your ISP. This isn't possible with multiple ISPs.
Alternatively, if you were trying to enhance performance between home and $job, or just wanted to steal bandwidth from $employer, then you could plop down a device at the office, then build a tunnel to it over each ISP connection, and then balance your traffic over those tunnels, likely at the expense of god awful latency and jitter.
If single-flow performance imüprovement isn't on the agenda, but aggregate improvement is (i.e. to improve peer-to-peer download), then you could run through a PAT device that would source traffic from IP#1, IP#2, ... and then shoot it down Connection#1, #2, ... This would be like server load balancing in reverse. I can't think of an app or device that would do this, but it would be pretty easy. You could probably do this with a cheap-o Cisco router with one ethernet/vlan to ISP#1, one to ISP#2, and one to Inside network, and then have two PAT configs tied into an extended ACL matching on destination traffic, and tell it to break out the traffic between the two PAT configs based on a wildcard match of 1/0 of the last bit in the IP (i.e. even/odd). I've used a similar config to balance many inside hosts in a pinch to many outside cheap ISP connections. I.e. last bits = 00, you get upstream#1 PAT, last bits = 01, you get upstream#2, last bits = 10, you get upstream #3, ...
int Fa0.1
desc Inside
ip addr 10.42.42.42 255.0.0.0
encaps dot1q 1 native
ip nat inside
int Fa0.100
desc isp#1
encaps dot1q 100
ip nat outside
ip addr dhcp
int Fa0/0.101
desc isp#2
encaps dot1q 101
ip nat outside
ip addr dhcp
ip nat inside source list 100 int Fa0.100 overload
ip nat inside source list 101 int Fa0.101 overload
access-list 100 permit ip 10.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 0.0.0.0 255.255.255.254
accessölist 101 permit ip 10.0.0.0 0.255.255.255 0.0.0.1 255.255.255.254
As a side-note, you may even be able to do per-packet balancing on outbound. Some ISPs will do uRPF, an anti-spoofing measure that prevents you from sourcing traffic from IPs that aren't routed back to the connection your ISP receives them on. Some ISP's don't.
Otherwise, you can policy-route the outbound traffic.
I'm sure you could whip up a similar config using unix packet filter of choice.
Peplink multi-WAN router supports forming multiple site-2-site VPN connections over multiple WAN connection. Failover and load balancing VPN traffic is supported. Routing between sites is automatically configured. 256 bit AES encrypted. Supports static IP, DHCP and PPPoE WAN types.
I'm not one to yell at noobs but I really can't imagine timothy did more than a Bing search because I see that pfSense comes up on the first page of results on Google when you query "multi wan".
PfSense is probably the go for this, but you are free to choose any other BSD or Linux based distro which gives you a nice pretty point and click web interface out of the box and good online documentation on how to use the features.
Hell, you don't even actually need physical hardware for this provided that you have two NICs available and a virtualization capable server.
Are you trying to bond all of your neighbor's WAPs together so you can aggregate their bandwidth? This could make bit torrenting an interesting thing.
Someone I know did this by setting up Linux routers with "Advanced Router" kernel features -- namely source-routing on established connections, so that established TCP connections could be consistently kept onto a single ISP connection. Without doing this then packets can be sent (or received) from an IP address not associated with the TCP connection, so they're dropped.
Obviously this won't work on UDP packets, since they're stateless; so if you have programs that need to stream data via UDP, that will be an issue.
Good luck with the project.
Admittedly, I have no idea if it works, nor do I have any idea how it decides to load balance between the connections.. But I ran across the feature the other day and it looked pretty cool.
In Mac OS X you can create a new "Aggregate" network device from any other devices and, in theory, do exactly what your describing. Again, I just ran across this the other day in Network Preferences and have no idea if/how it works, but it might be worth a shot (especially since it seems a lot easier to configure than a roll your own router with dd-wrt or tomato, though those likely offer more fine-tuned configuration).
appleguru.org
If you're trying to combine different types of access (leased-line, cable, DSL), I think you're out of luck with trying to aggregate everything into a single "super circuit". However, you can certainly utilize all of those individual circuits. Look up policy-based routing. Most every platform out there should support it through some method. Set it up so that email goes over the DSL, your database queries goes over the cable connection, and your VoIP goes over the leased-line. You'll probably need to tweak it a bit at first until you get a nice blend of traffic, and you'll want to make sure to set up some default routes to handle things if you have an outage on one of your circuits, but you'll see better performance on individual circuits and use all of them. If you've got the same type of access, but through different providers, you'll probably have to do the same. If you've got the same type of access through the same provider, then MLPPP or GRE should work.
> ...their cell phones strapped to the outside of their waists...
You strap yours to the inside of your waist? I'm trying not to visualize that...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Linux & iproute2 should be more than enough for what you want.
"Routing for multiple uplinks/providers"
Once the load balancing has been stablished you can set up OpenVPN to encrypt the traffic between the two (I like using openvpn + brigde to do a Layer 2 vpn). You can even get more fancy and add traffic shaping to distribute bandwith, prioritize packets (for a lower latency in ssh or terminal server traffic for example).
- Human knowledge belongs to the world
> I would never socialize with a slashdot user.
Good move. Having people talk about how hard it was to get the stench off after spending time with you would not help your job prospects (were you ever to graduate from Junior High). Better that you associate with your own kind. There's always work for unskilled labor.
I've been trying to find info on this for a little while.
Basically you have two methods: one is to get several internet connections, connect them to a machine/router and use load balance/pfsense/multippp. This gives you redundancy, load balance, and you can get faster d/l (for d/l multiple items) and is cheap. However, it does NOT provide a faster link. You have multiple connections, but any single d/l or u/l will only go as fast as one of the connections! For what I want this is unacceptable (trying to increase upload for a gameing server - because the IP's are different between two connections, we can't use load balancing for multiple connections). If anyone has found a way to link standard ADSL as a single connection for a single IP for faster upload, I'd REALLY like to hear it!
So from what I found we have the option of buying a huge connection (fibre or the like = VERY expensive), or something along the lines of BGP. BGP will link several connections, and from what I understand, pretty much makes you an extention of the services providers network. 1 IP, multiple connections reading as one endpoint. This is still expensive, but not as much as getting fibre laid out here. In my search I found one group that would do it for me, and the way they basically run is to put in a SDSL connection at 2M up/down, unlimited transfer. Then as you want faster, they just keep adding 2M lines up to about 24. However getting extra lines, the cost of the connections, and the cost of their modem/router is fairly prohibitive, but cheaper than a good fibre connection out here. As to what degree I'll get a better upload for the initial connection vs. ADSL would remain to be seen.
Lets suppose you have networks A and B. Given N cheap broadband connections on each side, lets call them A1, A2 ... A(N) and B1, B2 ... B(N)
At host A, for each A(N), B(N) pair, you set:
* a route for B(N)_IP via A(N)_Gateway
* a VPN link with source address A(N)_IP and destination B(N)_IP
* a static route for private networks behind B via each A(N)->B(N) virtual interface
Repeat for host B and each B(N), A(N) pair.
Problem: if each link has very distinct latencies, you will end up with package streams arriving at the other side heavily out of order. Tune your TCP stack accordingly.
Use OpenVPN with one separate connection per ISP you have. Use Linux's ethernet bonding on the new virtual ethernet devices created by OpenVPN. You'll probably want one of the round-robin methods that doesn't require any special switches. And you are done.
Whatever you do, DO NOT use multi-link PPP. You will essentially be using TCP over TCP without any smart software to handle the complications with two layers trying the same resending techniques every time a packet is lost. The connection will stall every time you lose a packet. It is a horrible experience. I learned this the hard way before using OpenVPN.
As many posters have pointed out, there are about a gajillion ways to do this (I'm a big fan of GRE, Quagga, and some judicious OSPF metrics :)
If you're talking about remote offices with workers who aren't IT-aware past "Oooooh, email" and you start adding layers of complexity to their Internet connection(s), you necessarily increase the risks of network downtime due to configuration errors, busted hardware, code bugs, etc... many times things you can't fix remotely. Some assessment of your target customer's tech-level for dealing with those issues should go in to the design decision. E.g. - implementing a Linux-based firewall on repurposed commodity hardware in an office without full time IT staff might make for a nightmare if the hard drive died; you likely would end up driving to that office to fix it, hiring a local "consultant" to assist if you can't drive there reasonably, or re-tasking someone's time in the office for your own nefarious IT purposes (instead of them being out there selling your employer's bread and butter).
If you're a centralized network manager at the company HQ, then the conversation that starts with "Powercycle the blue-and-white box and tell me what the LED's do" is a lot easier to deal with than "What does the screen say? Oh, well a kernel panic means something really bad happened..." You can mitigate those issues, but you'll inevitably end up on the phone someday with an office worker whose "Internet ain't workin". Sometimes it's easier to spend the money up front for a piece of dedicated hardware, rather than in the back-end on support costs (opportunity or actual).
presuming you are not using a suckful ISP and you've got ethernet, just etherchannel two ports together at both ends.
Some people (Cisco, etc.) are working on developing the Locator/ID Separation Protocol as a core component of the Internet infrastructure.
If that ever takes off, you'll be able to buy a Provider Independent IP address block, advertise it through multiple ISPs (even Cable/DSL), and transparently load balance your upstream and downstream traffic across them, without bloating the core BGP tables.
The downside is, you'll have to use an MTU that's smaller than 1500, but I'd say it's a fair trade.
The Advanced Routing Howto on tldp.org - nuf sed.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
An Internet Service Provider (ISP) isn't involved in a point-point. It's just a service provider at that point. Multiple links from the telco for redundancy is silly as the vast majority of problems will take down both links (cut fiber, local CO issues, etc). If you're talking mixing Telco, Satellite and Cable for redundancy as someone else mentioned, then I'd guess you are are talking about an ISP and running VPN then? In that case there are options such as mlppp, etc.
(We also have a freebie account with a local WISP that we do some business with for manual fail-over, but we haven't had to use it in years.)
That sounds like code for "we haven't tested our backup plans in years"
Having a backup and not testing it is a rookie move.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I don't work for Barracuda, but their link balancer (http://www.barracudanetworks.com/ns/products/link_overview.php) is ~$3700 US for the 3 connection device, with full support.
antipaucity
Hi,
If you are familiar with Linux you could Linux Advanced Routing and Traffic control (www.lartc.org) a try. Works for me budenling together three DSL lines.
Michael.
Relax, meme. Everything works fine. Not that it particularly has to, though: There isn't much that goes on in this particular small business which requires Teh Intarweb, anyway.
Assuming otherwise without further information is the mark of a real asshole. And just because it's a popular assumption over the past few days (Danger/Sidekick/T-Mobile/Microsoft) doesn't mean that it's universally true.
Now get back under your rock, #669689.
Kid-proof tablet..
Its long, at least read about Greenlight in N.C. and learn!
I am 100% positive you could do this with hardware that will run the DD-WRT, here is a list of DD-WRT supported devices, they have a search link, but I find that it does not work very well if you do not know the name of the router / firewall that you are looking for. So use the list and find a supported device.
You would need two of them and two different providers. You could even get a third one and do some special VLAN stuff to put some ports on all three on the same virtual network., many options.
These devices are very light weight, therefore shipping is next to nothing. The Linksys WRT54Gs' were great routers for the DD-WRT software. Costing over $75 when they first came out, dropping to $69 for years and finally hitting $15 or $30 when the stores were unloading them to bring in the new Linksys routers (none of which will support the DD-WRT software, except one that runs Linux). NOTE: there are BETTER routers than the WRT54G to run this software. The WRT54G will ONLY run the Micro version of the software. Do yourself a favor and get one that will run the Mega version of the software! (They cost less than $100 per and well worth the price.)
Linksys (Cisco) begin removing DD-WRT compatible firewall/routers from store shelves, replacing them with devices that are NOT compatible with the DD-WRT software in 2007/2008.
Get two DSL lines ($13 - $19 each), add in a NAT and a couple of these routers, probably need to do some secure tunneling to avoid the DNS of the Cable / DSL Companies and voila you are good to go. Your DSL speed will vary based on distance, but even far away you can get 1.5MB down and 384Kbps up. If closer you can get 3Mb down and 768Kbps up. (That is faster than 98% of Americans with Cable Modems because of throttling of service by Cable providers.)
Could you run the second DSL upstream over the first one? Thus saving the cost of a second telephone line, you would lose the redundancy that two telephones would provide, but save around $13 per month on a second phone line...probably better just to get the two lines, you total cost of ownership (TCO) will still be less than $60 per month and you will have redundancy. If one service gets stupid and starts throttling, drop them and get a different one. Politicians help us if they all throttle!
Solves allot of problems related to Cable companies throttling back service if you can create a secure VPN that their Deep Packet Inspection and/or Bandwidth shaping (throttling) service might have a harder time restricting (throttling). Granted they would still throttle you back by your IP address or MAC address of Cable Modem. Again, they do that now anyway.
A friend of mine was pissed that he was throttled back to less than 100K down and 0K up 85 - 95% of the time. He went on and paid his cable company the $10 burst / protection racket money / "give me a little more of what I am already paying for money" extra fee. Keep in mind that they were promising up to 8MP and delivering less from day one. He said he got a letter in the mail that they would be rolling out a new service in his area, the day after they started using that service, his bandwidth was throttled to next to nothing. (0 Kbps upstream, consistently less than 20Kbps). (There were 1 GB, 2GB and 3 GB ~ 1 second spikes ONLY, unless he was downloading a Linux distro, then he got 3GB - 4GB sustained with a 1 sec 6GB spike) He is convinced that they throttle him back because he uses Skype VoIP service (uses P2P packets) in a vain attempt to get him to switch to the Cable companies VoIP service. At less than $100 per year, Skype blows away any telco/Cable company offering.
Guess what his speed was after the switch over....Yep less than 100K (down) and 40K upstream 95% of the time. When he is throttled back to 0Kbps like I am, t
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
Link aggregation made easy (_easy_ as in ZFS making filesystems easy)
http://opensolaris.org/os/project/crossbow/
Any opensolaris distribution with the latest builds should have this (including Nexenta).
http://dilemma.gulecha.org - My philospohical short film.
A few years back I did this with a colleague, we actually investigated 3 solutions; 2 commercial and one linux script based, in the end the one that won easily was the Linux script.
Basically using iproute2 and some nice scripts gives you the ability to load balance your outbound packets and then using some relatively simple scripts to monitor each remote peer for automatic failover.
A quick google turns up this blogger who sounds (from a quick skim) like he's doing the same thing: http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/how-to-load-balancing-failover-with-dual-multi-wan-adsl-cable-connections-on-linux/
Unfortunately I can't remember the commercial solutions we tested (this was 4-5 years ago!), but although they did exactly what you wanted perfectly, our problem was that we were doing this for a managed services company who ran 150+ IPSEC VPN's over those (at the time) 3 bonded ADSL connections, needless to say the commercial solutions had never imagined anyone trying to statefully balance that many VPNs! However with some tweaking (to be honest a LOT of tweaking) we got the Linux solution working a treat, even with nearly seamless failover.
Google is your friend on this one.
Two Mikrotik routers would also work very well (http://www.mikrotik.com). You can pick up the whole thing for about $250-$300 for two of 'em and set it all up inside of about 15 minutes a piece. They're extremely reliable and the 4.0 release includes all kinds of fancy things that you can do to monitor, automatically fail over links and more.
Just add {In Space!} to anything.
Get two DSL lines ($13 - $19 each), add in a NAT and a couple of these routers, probably need to do some secure tunneling to avoid the DNS of the Cable / DSL Companies and voila you are good to go. Your DSL speed will vary based on distance, but even far away you can get 1.5MB down and 384Kbps up. If closer you can get 3Mb down and 768Kbps up. (That is faster than 98% of Americans with Cable Modems because of throttling of service by Cable providers.)
Sorry to ask, but is the broadband that slow in the US? I had no idea. I was using 40mbps on adsl, switched to fiber/cable and I'm now at 100mpbs here in spain.
In my family's house in Brazil, I'm using 100mbps as well. Costs about 10 times the price you said, but still is 10x cheaper per mbps....
The right way to do that is probably using BGP.
Yes, the author does rudely smack the original poster in the face, but as Captain Jack Sparrow said, he "may have deserved that."
The original poster didn't give us enough info. Aggregation from multiple ISPs is possible, but it's a lot dodgier performance-wise than aggregating multiple connections from the same ISP. On the other hand, your choices of possible solutions depend a lot on your problem - if you want to make a single fat TCP session go faster, for instance a big file transfer, that's a lot harder than load-balancing a bunch of smaller sessions. And of course most cheap consumer solutions are very asymmetric, so the upstream will be your limitation, and don't give you good Layer 2 feedback and probably aren't running TCP ECN either.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have written a solution which does exactly this -- http://broadbond.org/
What's so tricky about setting this up? Even the cheap Cisco 1800 series routers from years back support it. You just put one on each end and use the appropriate line cards and set it up.
First you need a well connected end point. Here for example you can buy very cheap (30€/month) unlimited bandwidth colocated servers. You just start an OpenVPN connection between that host and your Linux router on the site through each of your DSL lines. Using iptables random match, you mark each packet with one of two values. Then you use policy based routing to direct packets to one connection or the other based on the mark.
Then you just configure nat on the colocated host and add the proper default route on the local router. Voila.
I have pulled that off with linux routing 2 different ways.
At home, I played with 2 network connections, my cable modem and someone elses via a wireless bridge. There was a way to do round robin gateway choosing. I could sit there with a browser open to a site that shows what your IP is, and hit refresh and watch it randomly pick on or the other IP. This was helpful for bittorent type protocols where I was connecting to multiple locations as it started to share the load. Maybe not very level due to length of time some connections might have been open, but it was simple.
At work, we had cable and DSL for redundant connections. We set up a linux router that specified all data incoming on one IP range went out the DSL, and all other data went out the cable link. These ranges still used the same gateway IP address. On our workstations, we could set up our machines to be on both the cable and DSL ranges. We would then use source NAT rules to route types of traffic out as which ever IP range we wanted, or even choose to round robin the outbound IP so we could spread it out.
Being as you can pull off both of these options with linux and iproute2 and the firewall, you can build any box you can stuff 3 or more network interfaces in, and have this just work after a little bit of research.
At work we've just picked up a Draytek Vigor 2820 ADSL router, it's a bit fuller featured than your usual home modem, and it also allows aggregating bandwidth between the built in ADSL modem and either a USB connected 3G modem or any other IP connection connected over ethernet. We use the latter connected to a vanilla ADSL modem. As a whole it seems to work pretty well, the web interface is nonstandard, but after a while I got used to it, and you can set it up to either keep both connections active, or only fail over to WAN2 at a predetermined bandwidth usage or on failure of WAN1 (built in ADSL). Not sure what the OP is looking for, but the Vigor is just what we were looking for. (they do other versions with built in wireless and voip)
Although not with any of the solutions others have offered.
Two DSL links from different providers (would have worked with cable or satellite or GPRS/HSPA) -- the router uses iproute2 to set up multiple default gateways and use them in a round-robin fashion. Now I was going one step further; they wanted a single IP, so I extruded a multihomed IP from a colocated server and routed traffic for it over these multiple links (over L2TP tunnels, IIRC).
It worked really well, and you could aggregate more bandwidth simply by adding more connections. The colocated server had next to zero load. As links fell and came back, the ip-up scripts automatically adjusted and the overall bandwidth grew and shrank as they should.
If I were to do it again, I'd be a little smarter on the choosing of the link to use for a particular packet; i.e. have a management daemon that kept track of the average/burst traffic through each link and select the "best one" based on available bandwidth at that instant and expected return packet size.
He's asking a question that I once wondered about.
There's about 30 unsecured wireless internet connections my router can connect to in my apartment complex that are a good mix of cable and dsl. Can I rig up something that connects to every single one of them and uses the aggregate bandwidth to pull crap down at stupidly fast speeds. An example for clarification: There are 10 cable modems that I can connect to each one has a 6 meg connection, there are another 15 dsl modems each running at 3 meg connections. The aggregate connection speed would equate to a 105 meg connection.
What can I do to make use of this untapped potential?
I never figured out a solution that didn't involve buying a bunch of equipment.
Most people are talking about methods at layer 3 with a routed network in between you. I feel as though you really want multiple circuits in a bonded solution at layer two with multiple point to point links. If you make the connections point to point between the location, you can easily use per packet or per flow equal cost load balancing across the links.
If you want to use DS1s or DS3s for this, Overture Networks makes devices that bond the circuits together and bridges Ethernet right over top of them:
http://www.overturenetworks.com
In particular you'd want the ISG140 or ISG 180 (for up to 4 or 8 T1s) or the ISG 45 for multiple DS3s. I use their products extensively in a service provider environment. Very stable and extensible.
I really don't see why all the head scratching here is about. A proper bit of research on Google would answer this. This is a fairly trivial task with most any linux distro on both ends (Tomato or similar flashed routers would likly be able to do it also). I guess the limit on this is how many connections can you plug in (your hardware or kernel handle), and how many will your isp sell you.
I have to use multiple ISP where I live because none are reliable for 100% up time, and none will sell much more than 4 mb-6mb per connection but they will allow me to stack dsl connections as much as I want. SSH is my choice for VPN solution, but I suspect any other VPN will do the trick with some tweaking of the iptables and such.
Living in Chile
My ISP is doing so with Zhone TNE devices, pretty cheaply too.
How about CARP and pfsync. pfsense firewall has these features built in and has been documented to work well. I have not had the opportunity to use in a production environment but have setup a 2 provider instance in a home environment.
Yes, I'm at work on a 640Kb down maybe 90 or 128 up connection. Yes thats bits. At home however, I can get sustained 2MB (yes bytes) down but still not much more than 150KB up.
Obviously direct aggregation isn't possible, as each line will have a different source IP. What works is load balancing, but load balancing sucks. If you do per-TCP-connection load balancing on multiple lines, lots of sites will give you problems, as multiple requests for the same session are coming from different IPs. Online banking doesn't like this, ads-supported sites often don't like this (as the ad was loaded from a different IP). So this leaves you with per source-host load-balancing, and this only makes sense if there are lots of people who are two share the lines.
Doing real aggregation (bonding) requires a remote endpoint obviously, located in a datacenter somewhere for example. Problem: There is no standard protocol that works for a combination of different lines, Multilink-PPP will only work for several identical lines from the same ISP (ideally using the same clock source at the DSLAM etc). Why is that? That's because if you use multiple lines, they will have different latencies / round trip times. And if you bundle those, this means that TCP packets will overtake each other in-flight. So in the end whoever is receiving the re-assembled stream will get it out of order. And TCP can not differ between reordered and lost packet - if an unexpected (too high sequence number) packet is received, it is dropped. And this can not be solved by buffering at the router/PPP-device, because this buffering would interference with TCP windowing. In the end most of your aggregated bandwidth will therefore be eaten by retransmissions.
So, people may tell you to try this and that, but in the end everyone who has ever REALLY tried it himself will tell you: Forget about it, the performance will always be really bad (unless you have multiple identical lines).
There is a small german startup I work for which has solved the problem by creating a new bundled VPN protocol running on the way between the router in your office and the one in the datacenter, basically running a man-in-the-middle attack on TCP to get rid of the packet reordering in-flight. See http://www.viprinet.com/ for the available products and background info on how it works. Pricing starts at ~1000 USD, but obviously you'll need two boxes - probably not what you'd call "affordable". And sadly we do not yet have distributors inside the USA.
I've done this using FreeBSD on both ends on several occasions. We did it at a previous employer for an internal network in a bank connecting remote sites to the head office through multiple parallel ISPs for security and robustness reasons.
basically I used mpd (multilink PPP Daemon)
(available in FreeBSD packages/ports)
using it's "send each link over a udp or tcp session" feature. Then I bound the udp endpoints to different addresses each of which was in the address space of a different ISP that the machine was attached to, (it was attached directly to multiple ISPs). The resulting IP packets were then run through IPSEC for encryption. In Modern FreeBSD you would have the added option of having the encapsulated sockets bound to a different routing table/FIB so that the payload and envelope packets are routed completely differently. The internal packets could be encrypted too so that in general you have an encrypted part packet fragment inside an encrypted envelope.
It worked well and was very robust.
The downside is you need to have control over both sides of the link..
We use BGP to combine multiple circuits into a single bound circuit. We have outbound and inbound traffic working over this.
We have the routers set to not cache routing. But you can't expect to turn two 1.5Mb/s T1's into the same thing as true 3Mb/s connection. It is close, but a single video stream is only going to traverse one of the two T1's. A P2P download will use all 3Mb/s.
If all you really want is to speed up outbound connections (not inbound to a webserver for example) you can use something like a ZyXel 100 or 50. They have load balancing built in;
http://www.zyxel.co.uk/web/product_family_detail.php?PC1indexflag=20040908175941&CategoryGroupNo=PDCA2008004
www.sharedband.com
works well here in uk, just ensure none of your isps are packet shaping or have any prioritisation of traffic
just a thought, my twopen'orth if you will
From the charter:
We switched from M0n0wall to PFsense (a fork of the BSD-based M0n0) because PFsense supported aggregation. Our experience has been very positive. We aggregate two biz class Comcast 50 Mb (down) x 10 Mb (up) (& eventually will include a Verizon T-1) on an COTS PC stuffed with server grade NICs. The PC is driveless and boots off a USB. Rock Solid, out of pocket expense ~$400 for the Lenovo PC but you could probably find a much cheaper hardware platform.
I heard about a backpack-sized setup that you can get which takes a video input, compresses to HD quality, then splits the outgoing signal onto six separate cell phone data links (three are 3G, three are standard).
This was pretty expensive for 30 hours/month service but in theory would let you do high quality video without a satellite uplink or other special gear.
Presumably stitching the data streams back together is a pretty big hat trick especially with low latency.
--hongpong.com
That is one reason I put the subject as Pering and not Peering.
Yes we Americans are throttled back that severely, of course the Cable Company/Telco oligopoly (monopoly in many areas) will NOT call it throttling, they flat out deny that they restrict usage. And when they are caught red handed (Both Comcast and TWC have been in the past on numerous related issues, can you stay TCP/IP Stop Packets to interrupt an Internet users surfing of the Internet? Even Sprint one time blocked an entire range of IP addresses, I have forgotten and no longer care what their excuse was, as it was WRONG) they pull out the following BS excuses: pornography, child welfare, pedophilia, spammers, etc, etc, Ad nauseam. Like you are not smart enough to censor yourself and your family, please stop the FUD.
I, and many Americans, believe each family unit are the only ones who can independently determine if they want to self censor or not. It really is a freedom issue (net neutrality, bandwidth caps, bandwidth shaping, deep packet inspection and other bandwidth limiting strategies), a privacy issue, a simple Respect your customer issue.
As for bandwidth, it is a form of censorship, but much, much worse. It literally determines what content you and your family are able to get to, see and view. Hit the cap, you better pay up more or else you will be cut off.
As for bandwidth, less than 1% of the American population get the FCC definition of Broadband, which is 768K. Note my friend's speed test showed over 9000 Kbps down and over 900Kbps upstream. Yet he was throttled, restricted, prevented from getting bandwidths higher than 100Kbps downstream and 30 to 40Kbps upstream about 85% to 95% of the time. (We have talked and we both believe that we are throttled back about 98% of the time, however we wanted to be conservative in our criticism)
He is regularly throttled to 0Kbps upstream and it bounces from 0Kbps to 4Kbps or from 0Kpbs to 13Kbps, ocassionally up to 30Kbps. Not only can you not watch TV or video, but forget about using sites with allot of CSS or skins, for instance Digg and stumbleupon are not usable at that level of bandwidth throttling.
There are few if any off-the-shelf residential firewall/routers (DSL or Cable modem does not matter), typically costing less than $80 dollars per, that will show the home user actual logging information about what packets are and are not going through their firewall/router. Companies like Cisco/Linksys use the software as a product differentiating / limiting device to get users to spend more for more capability. However to get true TCP/IP and UDP packet information none of the Residential routers give you this information. Even the Linksys / Cisco firewall/routers costing in the $60 to $80 range vary greatly. I have a BEFSX41 (older non WiFi router) that would give me the outgoing and incoming IP addresses, but not packet information. When I purchased a newer (now old too) WRT54G WiFi (DD-WRT capable) firewall/router I expected even better logging. Yet the logging was even more limited. It did not make sense until you saw how they differentiated their products. Logical from a business pricing / marketing strategy, but still impractical to give home/residential users the opportunity to control and view their actual packet information. (Thus why I harp on the DD-WRT routers, so does my friend, once you have this capability and see what it does for you; the data/information that you now can use; you will not settle for anything less, I know I would not.)
In a "nut"shell many Americans take the speed test as gospel...what a crock, it is NOT. All it tells you is the devices between your PC and the ISP (DD-WRT enabled Firewall/Router and DSL/Cable Modem) will allow you to get that maximum speed at that specific moment. In the next moment all best are OFF. If you did a bell curve with my friends 9000 Kbps down / 900Kbps up. It would mean that he should expect to get the f
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
The 0-24 line thing was available in fractions, before fractional T1 was common.
If you were a small business that had, say, 4 telephone lines at a branch office, you could use this device to give you 3 voice lines and a fax line during the day and 4 data lines at night. It was up to you to put one of these "bonding modems" at your branch office and your main office, the telephone company wasn't involved.
This was also back in the days before 53K dialup was common, you would use your existing modems and get probably 14K or 28K but possibly 33.3K per "data line."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
we have such a thing running:
- 3 DSL-Links
- running 3 openvpn instances
- bonding this 3 tun devices into one bond0
on the other site we have a rootserver somwhere in a datacenter.
so we can use true speed together,.
and its better then loadbalancing, where you can use only one linespped per session.
with this setup you are able to run the accumulated speed of this 3 lines per session.
No kilobytes per second? So how do you make an HTTP request at all? That's upstream bandwidth. If you're truly not getting any outbound traffic, this likely indicates that there is something electrically wrong, not that they are shaping traffic that hard. Either that or you have a clogged pipe from your ISP up to the outside world.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No kilobytes per second? So how do you make an HTTP request at all? That's upstream bandwidth.
Tell me about it, it sucks! However let me clarify...
Since our service is throttled back most of the time to either 4Kbps or 0Kbps. And you are correct at that level of restriction hardly anything will load. I certainly can not use Digg, stumbleupon, hootsuite and a couple of other social media websites that load more CSS style stuff than other sites...those sites are unusable at upstream bandwidths less than 20Kbps in my personal experience. Whenever a website does not load or loads very, very slowly, I just switch to one of my other Linux windows where the bandwidth monitoring status is being graphed and I typically see bandwidths less than 20Kbps. Its shocking how often its only 4Kbps or 0Kbps. Its disgusting, especially considering its costing me more than $50 per month for cable modem access. That is too much for too little service. DSL at less than $30 per month, sustained bandwidths of 1.5Mbps down and 384Kbps or higher up, is looking very enticing! Thus this slashdot story, putting two DSL providers on your network starts to make allot of sense!
I think most of us would agree that only getting 20Kbps upstream is unacceptable for cable modem access to the Internet advertised as high speed broadband!
With the DD-WRT software you see a continuous graph for both your downstream and upstream bandwidth 24X7. (You do not have to let this bandwidth status graphing run if you do not want to.) With the upstream line bouncing between 0Kbps and 40Kbps. And a second downstream line bouncing between 4kbps and 100Kbps most of the time, however you will see higher spikes upstream...up to 300Kbps, 700Kbps, 1Mbps, occasionally 2Mbps and even rarer 3Mbps downstream.
The higher spikes upstream are fewer and farther in between, and rarely rise above 100Kbps. It becomes pretty obvious that the bandwidth shaping software is controlling users ability to watch any streams (IP TV, Video, Movies, etc...) by throttling (limiting) the upstream bandwidth. My guess is that if you had a sustained 300Kbps (even slower DSL services offer this) upstream you would be able to watch multiple video / TV streams without sputters and/or interruptions. You might need a bit more if those streams are high definition. Since most users are limited upstream to less than 40Kbps (dropping down constantly to 0Kbps) this is what prevents you from watching video via the web.
The FCC and our politicians could break this effectively by decreeing any bandwidth less than 786Kbps can not be considered high speed broadband. Make it FRAUD to declare otherwise. Quite frankly that is a very old standard, even though it was recently set. The 2000 broadband standard should have been 100MB/100MB. The 2006 standard should have been 1GB/1GB. If the telcos/cable companies had given us fiber for our tax dollars as they promised(1990s), that would be the standard today! Do you have respect for promise breakers?
Back to reality, ... With the DD-WRT software showing you your actual bandwidth, you see those lines drop to 0Kbps around 50% or more of the time. In other words, you spend much more time at between (0Kbps and 4Kbps) upstream than you do at 40Kbps or higher.
As far as equipment being damaged, that is the kind of FUD that even the Cable company will try to throw out at an unknowing and less knowledgeable public. Since the Speed tests show you that given that few seconds in time your equipment (firewall/router running DD-WRT + Ethernet network + optional hubs + more Ethernet + Cable Modem) works just fine, but ONLY during that moment in time. Thus the very speed test they tout as proving you have great service (even when you do not) also proves that your equipment is functioning just fine. (They artificially prevent it from working as well at other times.)
In fact if you have DSL or Cable
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
lol, that was a typo, I had to search for 0K to find it, comes from my first post, should have read 40Kbps as like me, he wants to be conservative in his estimate, the reality is worse than 40Kbps 85% - 95% of the time.
It should have read
A friend of mine was pissed that he was throttled back to less than 100Kbps down and 40Kbps up 85 - 95% of the time.
Since the other related quotes all have either 30K or 40K and state that the bandwidth is "shaped" to less than 0Kbps on a regular basis, I will assume that you are having some fun with me at my expense. Good catch and I have a great sense of humor. Thanks for allowing me to correct it.
Hopefully my point was well understood in spite of that typo...at least I hope so. The simple point is that both my friend and I are prevented from getting acceptable bandwidths to surf the Internet, with one Cable provider specifically, approximately 80% -95% of the time. In reality it is something higher than 95% of the time, but by stating either 80% to 95% or 85% to 95% of the time, we both are being conservative.
These quotes are from the two posts, related to the percentage of time (restricted, filtered, throttled, prevented, censored, , shaping, etc...) in addition to the one above:
From the first post, #29766339
Guess what his speed was after the switch over....Yep less than 100K (down) and 40K upstream 95% of the time. When he is throttled back to 0Kbps like I am, the videos sputter, gMail, twitter, Facebook and MySpace will not load because of the little extra bandwidth required for the skins and CSS markup language.
From the second post, #29766339
Yet he was throttled, restricted, prevented from getting bandwidths higher than 100Kbps downstream and 30 to 40Kbps upstream about 85% to 95% of the time. (We have talked and we both believe that we are throttled back about 98% of the time, however we wanted to be conservative in our criticism)
However he is getting less than 100K down and less than 40K up well over 85% of the time.
We suspect that every cable providing Internet access does this same thing and that most people do not have a firewall/router with software capable of showing them their bandwidth in real time; so in reality most people do NOT know.
Is your Internet Throttled? Install DD-Wrt, OpenWRT or Tomato to learn the truth! Google: 1Gbps/1Gbps: 5 Communities
However most UNIX-like OS support connection binding. You can do this with Linux or BSD for sure, the problem is that the binding needs to be in place on both ends, you can't have a fast transfer rate to an arbitrary non-participating site. I used to have an ISP who let me bind multiple dial-up connections to his DSLAM, which did give fast connection to the outside world, but it wasn't a telco ISP. I could do it in the hours when he always had many unused ports, like 1am-6am, etc. But it still took two cooperating end points, it was just that one was a DSLAM.
You seem to have gotten other useful information, and you can also do it through multiple vpn connections, although I know of no remotely automated way to do it, I used to make the two connections and then run a script, aggregating a DSL and cable connection.
My feeling is that it's enough trouble do be of limited value, but it can be done, which was your original question.
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