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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?"
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
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]
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
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.