Ask Slashdot: Best Connect Scheme For a 2-ISP Household?

c_petras writes "I just had DSL installed (a 19,000 ft run — Woo Hoo!) to act as a backup to my regional WiFi connection. How should I configure my home network so I don't have to swap the cable from one ISP's router to the other to maintain a good connection? Is it as simple as getting another router and plugging the two ISPs in? Is there a more elegant solution that would not require the use of three separate boxes and associated wall warts?"

Comments

What router/firewall?

[Kenja]

This is the job of a good router/firewall, but without knowing what you're running there's no way to answer the question.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=dual+wan+router

Re:What router/firewall?

[blair1q]

He's not going to find that on his typical home router, which comes with one upstream port and one downstream subnet.

Albeit some have hidden capabilities: mine has the hardwired downstream subnet, the hardwired upstream port, and one wireless subnet that can mimic two (the secure wireless and the guest wireless). This is probably pretty typical for wireless routers right now.

But still, the second WAN port is not going to be there unless you shop around. Ala kazam:

http://www.google.com/search?q=google+shopping&q=router+dual+wan

Re:What router/firewall?

[blair1q]

wtf. that link as posted does not behave as it did when i pasted it in my browser.

try this one:

http://www.google.com/search?q=router+dual+wan&tbm=shop

yeh. mosh bedda.

Re:What router/firewall?

[ryanov]

The one that my church uses has a 2 WAN option:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9926/index.html

Not a home class one, but only $260.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Kenja]

Well its not a typical requirement. I use a Netscreen 25 which has four ports, each configurable as its own security zone (so you can have any mix of trusted and untrusted ports). Can get one for under 100 dollars via ebay.

The point was, we dont know what hardware he's running. If he's looking for hardware recommendations, that would be one thing. But its hard to tell from the article.

Re:What router/firewall?

[blair1q]

He's got two bridges (one DSL and one for his regional WiFi) and some computers. The bridges presumably each have an ethernet port on his side of the box. He doesn't know how to connect the computers to the bridges so the thing just routes. Any dual-wan router will fit in that hole in his system. It's not so complicated that we need to know more.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

Combine with software like Vicomsoft Internet Gateway on an old Mac?

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2005/pulpit_20050414_000849.html

Re:What router/firewall?

[Lumpy]

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/prod/collateral/routers/ps9923/ps9925/data_sheet_c78-501225.html

Home router with dual wan...

Re:What router/firewall?

[WidgetGuy]

Online prices for that Cisco router (RV042 Dual WAN VPN) are from $150 - 160USD + shipping (and, in some cases, sales tax). Slightly more than my $40 home (single WAN/ 4 port) Wifi router. Probably best categorized as a SMB budget router.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Amouth]

i didn't think cisco made anything that cheaply priced - hell copper gbic's cost more than 260$

Re:What router/firewall?

[TooMuchToDo]

Get a CradlePoint router. I manage 20+ of them remotely, and they'll load balance/failover to any number of connections based on how many ethernet ports the device has. We're using the MBR1400, which has 5 USB ports for multiple cellular/wimax adapters, but also has 5 ethernet ports, which can be configured in any number of lan/wan interfaces. It also does ping tests across the devices you're using so you really know when the connection is down (instead of relying on local link status). Failover, load balancing of WAN links, all for $320.

http://www.cradlepoint.com/products/mbr1400-mission-critical-broadband-router

Disclaimer: Just a very satisfied customer, no other relation.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Tacvek]

On the other hand, the average Linksys box actually uses a switch that supports multiple VLANs. The Wan port is actually on the same switch as the 4 LAN ports, but just on a separate VLAN. 6th port (to the router proper) is the only one configured by default to be in multiple VLANs and to see tagged frames.

As you might be able to guess, it is relatively straightforward to merge all ports onto a single VLAN, or to sacrifice one of the LAN ports to create a second WAN port. Obviously the default firmware for the routers don't supply this option, but custom firmware can do this.

Re:What router/firewall?

[LodCrappo]

wish i had mod points, this is the correct answer to the question.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Kompressor]

That's likely because the RV series came out of their Linksys purchase - I've deployed Linksys RV042 routers in the past; they were reasonably priced and didn't give me any maintenance issues.

They were rather lackluster from a configuration and firmware perspective - they were capable of basic VPNs and had 2 WAN ports, but that's about all for features over a home class router.

Re:What router/firewall?

[JayAEU]

I've been using and deploying these Linksys/Cisco RV0xx models for quite a few years now. Good feature set, great reliability, no problems. I hope they never stop making them!

Re:What router/firewall?

[Amouth]

when you say "firmware" you are leading me to believe they are not IOS supported devices.. and if that is so then they are from the linksys side and not what i consider actual "cisco" hardware.

while i like/liked linksys and i like cisco - and i'm fine with the buyout.. some of their decisions have muddied the waters and made it a little more difficult to find the right solution.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Kompressor]

when you say "firmware" you are leading me to believe they are not IOS supported devices.. and if that is so then they are from the linksys side and not what i consider actual "cisco" hardware.

Yes, they're definitely of Linksys origin - pre-Cisco buyout by quite some time. They're significantly more reliable than the standard Linksys home router, but I suspect the fact that I always made sure to supply them with a nice clean 60 Hz sine wave at 120V had a lot to do with it.

while i like/liked linksys and i like cisco - and i'm fine with the buyout.. some of their decisions have muddied the waters and made it a little more difficult to find the right solution.

I agree - Cisco putting their name on Linksys hardware in the consumer sector is easy to see past, but knowing whether you're looking at something that descended from Linksys or IOS heritage is difficult at the bottom end of the business line.

I generally don't deploy these for my clients any more, as I'm working with businesses that are willing to invest a bit in more feature-full hardware than I was before. I've had good luck recently with Fortigate, and their focus on security is, IMHO, worth the slight premium for the hardware and the yearly support contracts.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

IF you can afford 2 high speed internet lines and you cant afford a$150.00 router you are screwed up in the head financially.

Re:What router/firewall?

[jc42]

wish i had mod points, this is the correct answer to the question.

Nah; probably not. First, the question wasn't "How do I use my dual WAN router?" The question was "I have two (independent) WAN connections; how do I best use them?"

And "Get a dual-WAN router" isn't a very good answer, especially when the person said explicitly that part of their motivation for the second collection was as a backup to the first. This implies that they want two independent routers, so if one dies, they can still use the other while the dead one gets fixed or replaced. If you have just one dual-WAN router, and it dies, both of your WAN connections are now useless, shooting down your intention to have a backup route.

There are good uses for a dual-WAN router. Answering this person's question isn't one of them, since it simply moves the single-point-of-failure problem from the ISP to the router. If you're trying to avoid single points of failure, you probably don't want to do it by introducing a new one. ;-)

(Actually, I do have mod points. But I decided it was better to reply here. I can probably find another discussion to do some mods in. Lessee ... There's the one about ad networks not honoring do-not-track. Sure wish there was a "Well, duh!" moderations. ;-)

Re:What router/firewall?

[LodCrappo]

I think you are being intentionally thick when you suggest he is worried about the router as a single point of failure. He obviously is trying to failover the internet connections, not the router. This is a home network. He doesn't need five 9s, he needs 1 or 2, which a cheap dual wan router provides with great ease. A few minutes setup time and he is no longer down if one internet connection fails. Done. No need to make it more complicated than that.

Re:What router/firewall?

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What I did.

[grub]

I did this a couple of years ago with DSL and cable. My choice was to use OpenBSD's Equal-Cost Multipath Routing. I've seen other hardware devices that accept two broadband connections but the OpenBSD option was much more elegant and allowed some good granularity in traffic control (ie.: traffic to my cable ISP's billing page may as well go through the cable connection)

I had a couple of lines in pf.conf as so:

table <route_cable> persist file "/etc/route_cable"
table <route_dsl> persist file "/etc/route_dsl"

then would force the network ranges/IPs contained through the appropriate interface.

I dumped the DSL about a year ago but this worked very well for me. YMMV. Mail me if you'd like more info/tips.

Re:What I did.

[grub]

Oh I should note that this was pretty basic load sharing (I won't grace it with the term "load balancing") not failover.
A script would ping out through each interface and if one went down all traffic was rerouted out the other so failure of one link didn't botch things up.

Re:What I did.

[Bastardchyld]

I recommend pfSense 2.0 RC3 to be specific. It has a new ability to use Multiple WANs, you can even weight them based on which has a better connectivity and balance traffic over both. Giving you load balancing and failover between both connections.

Re:What I did.

[grub]

Ohh that sounds sweet (just did teh googlez on it) I don't think it had those features when I looked back when.

Re:What I did.

[grub]

No problem asking: they were both business accounts. I was trying to keep a lot of the stuff in-house as I'm an admitted control-freak but decided to drop the DSL and do more on remote *nix boxes. The price is about the same and I get a full 100/100 Mbits on the remote ends.

Re:What I did.

[Anonymous Coward]

Availability.

Re:What I did.

[pz]

I'm not the highly informative poster above, but can readily speculate justifications nevertheless: (1) reliability, reliability, reliability, (2) cost differential between the two services during different times of the day or days of the week, (3) to maximize available bandwidth if one or the other connection bogs down from one's neighbor, (4) to be able to tell one or the other service to frell off on a moment's notice, (5) to be able to load down one ISP's connection, say with a large file transfer, and have the local network still remain responsive by automatically switching everything else to the other ISP, etc.

I've implemented a related, but certainly not identical, system in my home with two wireless APs running two independent networks feeding a single cable connection. Robustness was the primary motivation.

Re:What I did.

[v1]

I'm kind of honestly baffled that somebody would need more than one ISP at home

I run a variety of small services at my home, have done so for 15 yrs. Mail and web for example. I have DSL and cable. My DSL just recently upgraded to 1up/7down from 1up/1.5down (umm thanks for the DOWNstream bump... not), and the cable is now at 2up/25down. Obviously cable is the better performer, but it's also less reliable/consistent and doesn't offer static IP addresses. And my cable speeds can really dip badly during prime time when everyone is netflix'ing. DSL is fairly stable any time of the day.

Qwest's DSL in my area (read STATE) was down for over two entire weeks because the clowns built both of their regional NOCs 100ft from the same river. MediaCrap just goes down whenever a fly in Kenya farts, but it's always back up again in an hour or less. (usually happens early in the AM, guessing that's when they move their patch cables around? *shrug*) Neither of them are in any hurry to provide me with better upstream speeds or more reliable service, such is my fate in an area that lacks choices/competition.

Re:What I did.

[msauve]

What if someone works at home, and needs a reliable connection to the corporate network? I'll let the boss know I'll be watching TV whenever the net goes down.

Re:What I did.

[Vegemeister]

you...have to watch TV instead

A terrible fate indeed.

Re:What I did.

[msauve]

Actually, what you said was:

The question is, why would someone need that level of availability at home? At a business, if you have downtime, you lose money. At home, if you have downtime, you...have to watch TV instead?

Re:What I did.

[Eunuchswear]

I bet you don't understand why some people might want more than 640k either.

Re:What I did.

[wolrahnaes]

Echoing this. I started with pfSense because I wanted a multi-WAN router, but still use it to this day even on single-WAN environments because it's trivial to get going on any spare PC hardware, can be easily built in to an "appliance" with a number of available embedded x86 boards, and does pretty much everything. Of course it's not as fast as hardware built for the purpose, but if you have hardware encryption available I haven't yet seen a reason to choose a PIX/ASA over it on performance grounds. Obviously support and corporate love for Cisco are other factors which may come in to play for some applications.

Re:What I did.

[msauve]

"If one were to be working from home, then that would qualify as "at a business.""

Not to the IRS, and there's a reason it's called "work at home," not "work at business" when you work from home. Duh.

Re:What I did.

[wolrahnaes]

Shitty service.

A few years ago I lived in a town called Wellington, Ohio. The LEC in the area was Verizon (now Frontier) who offered a DSL service that was officially supposed to be around 3m/768k but usually barely beat 2m/512k and would go entirely down (signal loss at the modem or no PPPoE response) for hours at a time multiple times per month. My roommate and I tried multiple modems including the Verizon-provided Westell, a Cisco 675, a few Motorolas, and an Edgemarc 200AW with no change, nor did installing a direct 35 foot Cat5e link from the telco demarc to the modem, entirely disconnecting the in-house wiring (we were cell-only and worked at a VoIP company so we had no interest in POTS).

So go to cable, you may say. Enter GLW Broadband. Basically, these guys were a local cable TV provider who did the minimum necessary to keep people mostly happy with their TV in these semi-rural areas. At some point they added broadband internet services, but it's clear that they do not take it seriously. As far as I could tell during my time as a customer of theirs as well as while working with customers of mine who had their internet services, they had a single upstream connection to Time Warner. They were somehow worse than Verizon. The modem would lose sync regularly, when it was up the speed was rarely even the 1.5/768 that it was supposed to be, and more than once static IPs just stopped working altogether and would have to be changed. One of my customers I shared with them was literally a stone's throw down the street from the GLW main office, yet they had an outage which lasted a week which they couldn't figure out. I could have run a standard ethernet cable across the lawn between the offices and it would have been entirely within spec.

There was also a local WiFi ISP, but they wouldn't even offer a non-NATed address so they were right out.

When faced with these options, the only option if you want anything approaching reliability is to get as many as you can afford and hope they're not all sucking at the same time.

Re:What I did.

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is, why would someone need that level of availability at home?

You must have experience in tech support. That's a typical answer to a request, "why do you need that?"

Your lack of imagination doesn't equal someone else's lack of need.

Re:What I did.

[next_ghost]

You must have experience in tech support. That's a typical answer to a request, "why do you need that?"

Your lack of imagination doesn't equal someone else's lack of need.

The main problem of tech support is that what people try to do and what they really need tends to be two very different things. When you do tech support or software design, asking "why do you need that?" right in the beginning can save you a lot of pain later caused by lack of imagination and basic knowledge on the client's side.

Re:What I did.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you happen to be an independent contractor for example, working from home in some heavily internet reliant industry while billing out $100+ hr, reliability is pretty crucial. Avoiding one single hour of downtime would pay for the extra monthly bill. A day of avoided downtime will pay the mortgage. You get the picture.

Re:What I did.

[I)_MaLaClYpSe_(I]

For example, I enjoy playing poker tournaments. One of the tournaments I play on a regular basis starts at 00:00. At around 2 a.m. my ISP seems to choose his preferred downtime windows as this is out of his support window. I can't even call my ISP and complain at that time.

I currently circumvent these downtimes that might occur once every month or so by switching to my iPhone hotspot. But on the one hand side this means loosing at least two or three hands. This is especially cruel if I happen to have great cards and have just bet a significant amount of chips and then my line goes #carrier lost. On the other hand side this compromises my VPN solution that I implemented to circumvent the human rights violating data retention laws in my county.

I am sure there are other sane reasons for private redundant internet lines if not for the disturbing moment where your lolcats video starts to hang or where your wanking is suddenly interrup#carrier lost

Re:What I did.

[I)_MaLaClYpSe_(I]

And one time, at downtime, I wrote this really long enlightening commentary on Slashdot and when I hit the submit but#carrier lost

Re:What I did.

[WolphFang]

Indeed. pfSense is a seriously useful bit of software! set up a college's main firewall with auto failover between two firewalls.... it can even replicate states and configs automatically. It can also run from CD-ROM with a floppy to store the config on if you have an older box.... And can use just one NIC you have the ability to sep things out by VLAN, etc.

Re:What I did.

[gnapster]

My boss just implemented PJ-Thursdays, so we can "work at home" in our downtown office building, you insensitive clod!

Re:What I did.

[m50d]

I've implemented a related, but certainly not identical, system in my home with two wireless APs running two independent networks feeding a single cable connection.

Huh? Surely that's backwards from the useful way to do it - all your client machines would need to be able to connect to two wireless networks simultaneously and sensibly failover between them.

Re:What I did.

[pz]

Yes, except that I implemented two separate networks to partition clients into two separate pools. Thus the "related, but certainly not identical" part of my comment. The intent is related in that each pool of clients is made more robust to what the other pool is doing.

Connect routers with a string of bitcoins

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the Slashdot-approved solution.

Re:Connect routers with a string of bitcoins

[blair1q]

I knew bitcoins really came from china. It explains the hole in the middle where the string goes.

Re:Connect routers with a string of bitcoins

[msauve]

Only half the bitcoins are like that. The other half look like sticks.

PFsense

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Setup a pfSense router/firewall
2. Configure Failover
3. ??
4. PROFIT!

Re:PFsense

[yakatz]

I was about to write pfSense when I saw the parent post, so I will just second it.
I use it at home and at several of my clients, and one of those has dual WANs.

(Full disclosure: I have contributed (code, not money) to pfSense.)

Re:pfSense

[Anonymous Coward]

I second this. Maybe add untangle...

Re:PFsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Many people here know that Code takes Time
Everyone knows that Time is Money
Therefore: Code is Money!!!

Re:PFsense

[That's What She Said]

You said "Code takes Time".

So, Code contains or is made of Time. If Time is Money, Code contains or is made of Money.

When people just write more code to try to squash a bug, they're just "throwing money at it", right?

Re:pfSense

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that, a small industrial PC with two or 3 network cards, and s small switch, running pfSense. It has policy routing, sticky, load balancing, etc, this is what I used to run my 3 internet connections to home between 2008 and 2010 (I moved to a place with no internet now). I do not recall what versions but 2.0 rc something.

Also, if you are willing to play a little bit more, and be more professional look at Mikrotik and get a board with the needed capabilities. It will be extremely stable set and forget experience.

Quick Google

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/security/ssg-series/ssg5/

Multi-WAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Spend a few hundred bucks and get a multi-WAN router that will combine the connections. Peplink is good apparently: http://ma.tt/2011/03/peplink-review/

Re:Multi-WAN

[zugmeister]

I've used the Cisco/Linksys RV042 to good effect. You can tell it what speed your connections are and let it do a weighted round robin load balance type thing or just set one connection as failover if the primary goes down. Small, quiet and will run you about $150.

PFSense is a great place to start

[Anonymous Coward]

PFsense (www.pfsense.org) is a great open source multi-wan router. I currently run 3 separate incoming connections to my network with it flawlessly. Combine this with great VPN,load balancing, round robin connection, traffic shaping, and bandwidth monitoring and it is a fantastic easy to use tool.

Re:PFSense is a great place to start

[TheRaven64]

Note that with this setup you still have to manually reconnect persistent connections if one ISP goes down. If you need transparent fail-over, then things get a lot more complicated (and expensive!) because you'll need the same IP address (range) from both ISPs.

Re:PFSense is a great place to start

[bunny.rabbit.3]

I second this choice. I used pfSense in a multi-WAN corporate solution. I had fast & cheap cable for common users which failed over to a 3xT1, which was normally reserved for server traffic. Before the cable, we had DSL that was about the same speed as the T1 and toyed with round robin load balancing. Eventually, I convinced my brother to switch to this solution for his home network. He manually switched between 2 providers that both had 5 GB limits each month. This worked flawlessly until he upgraded to a better provider 2 years later.

easy as...rocket science.

[Anonymous Coward]

sure, it's as easy as learning BGP routing..huh huh... Or there might be a router out there with two WAN ports, that you can give metrics to say which is the perferred network. But the only ones i know of are Cradlepoint routers for 4g/wired networks.

Re:easy as...rocket science.

[grub]

Convince your home ISPs to play BGP with you... Good luck! :)

Re:easy as...rocket science.

[Barret7SC]

Cradlepoint is going to allow you to have multiple WAN ports on devices with multiple ethernet ports on their newer products in a future firmware update. I'd recommend the MBR95. That should allow the OP to do what he wants to do.

Re:easy as...rocket science.

[Nethead]

Have you seen the price on an ASN these days? It would almost pay for a T1.

Re:easy as...rocket science.

[Kompressor]

A guy can dream, right?

Pfsense

[Anonymous Coward]

Pfsense is a great solution

Home Server

[muyla]

You can set up an old computer as a home server doing the balancing of the two connections, and you can even add some more functions to it (file server, vpn, etc).

A good distro for it is Zentyal, which is based on ubuntu and will let you config the whole thing over a web browser, just like one of those d-link routers.

pfSense

[gellenburg]

My recommendation: pfSense.

Or ClearOS.

pfSense is FreeBSD based. ClearOS is linux-based.

dd-wrt

[mmmmbeer]

If your router supports dd-wrt, it has this option built in. You may need more than one router for this. I've never tried it, but there's info about it here: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Mesh_Networking_with_OLSR

Re:dd-wrt

[Anonymous Coward]

DD-WRT was my first thought for something that could do this with out costing a fortune but Mesh Networking isn't even close to what the OP is asking about.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Dual-WAN_for_simple_round-robin_load_equalization

or

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Dual_WAN_with_one_as_standby_backup

Re:dd-wrt

[skids]

Most WRT-capable boxes will have one upstream port an a LAN port connected to a built-in switch. It should be possible to VLAN the switch in such a way as to peel off a single port to act as a second WAN port. However, a good amount of this hardware will boot up with the switch running open, and will not apply the VLANs until the bootloader initializes the switch. So it's not suitable if that moment of open bridging causes problems with the provider or you have high security

Also that would mean you'd be sharing the bandwidth of the built-in switch''s uplink port between LAN traffic going in and out of the hard ports, WAN traffic to the second ISP, and traffic between the LAN and WiFi. If you do not have any hardwired LAN, however, none of the above problems apply. You just have to tough it out to get past all the defaults trying to set the LAN port up as a LAN.

If you pick a unit with GE ports, sharing the bandwidth should not be a problem, but do take care to install anti-bufferbloat policing.

Re:dd-wrt

[Anonymous Coward]

The OP's setup involves a regional WiFi connection plus a wired DSL connection. Couldn't the DD-WRT operate in wireless bridge (client?) mode while hooking up the DSL to the wired WAN port? I'm not sure if DD-WRT supports this type of dual WAN (wired + wireless) out of the box, but some console commands might be able to get the routing right.

Re:dd-wrt

[skids]

OpenWRT can act as a client, though support for this can be a bit dicey. You CAN get the web interface to cooperate and define interfaces/zones as you want, it's just not intuitive. I don't remember seeing anyone talking about making the radio simultaneously act as a client and an AP...

But then, if one is a wireless service, does that service even need a router, wouldn't the clients join directly? So why the need for two ports?

Expensive But Available

[erilane]

There are companies that make routers with 2 WAN links. Health checks are run periodically (pinging a public DNS server or some other reliable IP through the link), and traffic is routed across your preferred link if it is up, or the backup if the preferred link is down. The one I'm familiar with is made by FortiNet and costs $500+ http://www.fortinet.com/products/fortiwifi/50B.html

Re:Expensive But Available

[TheRaven64]

Wow, that's expensive. Something like a PC-Engines ALIX board with three LAN ports running pfSense provides the same functionality (complete with pointy-clicky web interface) at a quarter of the price. Installing pfSense is just a matter of writing the .img file to a CF card, so there's not even the argument that there's a cost saving in terms of time - it takes a lot longer to configure either system than it will take to install.

Re:Expensive But Available

[ryanov]

Linksys RV082 is a cheaper alternative. I'm not 100% sure how the routing works, but it seems to me it accounted for downed links.

Untangle

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like a job for untangle firewall and router

www.untangle.com

Re:Untangle

[jijacob]

In order to get multiple wan balancing/failover you end up having to pay a subscription fee. No thanks.

Load Balancer....

[Anonymous Coward]

To do fail over or balance your Internet usage over two ISP links you would need a load balancer. ELFIQ is one such balancer that is reasonable priced. To get a Firewall appliance that can do the same you are looking at a much higher cost.

You may be able to set up the same sort of thing using a Linux box, but once you factor in the time to set things up you're better off with a load balancer appliance.

google: dual-wan router

[CityZen]

What you might consider is a dual-wan router. It can replace your regular router and provide more connectivity options.
Unfortunately, for the low-end ones that I looked at, the options were limited:
1) fail-over mode. Normally use WAN-A until it dies, then use WAN-B.
2) dual-WAN mode. Client 1 goes to WAN-A, client 2 goes to WAN-B, client 3 goes to WAN-A, etc.

What you probably really want is a truly load-balanced mode, which requires either going higher-end, or rolling something yourself with a PC.

There are some hacks for dd-wrt and such to make a router dual-WAN, but that looked to be more bother than I wanted to go in for.

Ultimately, for me, I made one WAN connection pretty solid such that I didn't have to bother with all this.

RV042

[Isarian]

The "Cisco" RV042 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124160&Tpk=RV042) supports this, by having two WAN Ethernet ports. Plug them both in and go. Relatively inexpensive at $180, sometimes you can find deals online for them. I say "Cisco" because I think the hardware is just rebranded "Linksys" gear from before the merger.

Re:RV042

[Anonymous Coward]

Just want to add that the RV0x2 series are being end-of-lifed by Cisco and will not offer support of IPv6.

Re:RV042

[Overzeetop]

Yeah, but he's only 4 miles from his TELCO. By the time IPv6 is rolled out, he'll have FTTH. ;-)

Re:RV042

[Mr.Ziggy]

I thought the RV042 was going to be the godsend product: relatively cheap for dual-wan support in small offices. Turns out it just sucks.

My *personal* suspicion is it is part of the constant Cisco screwups of everything Linksys, but that's a different conversation.

RV042's run HOT, break, don't auto-switch or auto-detect a network outage like they are supposed to. Installed a bunch in some offices and had to replace all of them.

DO NOT buy the RV042.

Peplink makes a good but expensive dual-wan router which does everything you want and more. It is a larger, more robust office size product with pricing to match. But very good.

Otherwise you are looking at a BSD/Linux roll your own solution. I haven't seen anything good and small with 3 ethernet ports embedded in.

Re:RV042

[kevin_j_morse]

I would second this. Although the hardware is rebranded Linksys the firmware is completely redesigned by Cisco. I'm using two of these to run a bunch of web and mail servers and they're performing quite well.

Re:RV042

[kevin_j_morse]

Follow up to that. I'm using RV082 v3 which actually do support IPv6. SmallNetBuilder has a good review of them here http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanwan/lanwan-reviews/31525-cisco-rv082-and-rv016-v3-vpn-routers-reviewed

Re:RV042

[kevin_j_morse]

What hardware revision is it? When Cisco first bought Linksys they still sold the Linksys version for a while as a Cisco product. Now they have completely redone the product with a new processor, more memory, and new firmware. Like I mentioned in my previous post I used two of these at a company that I did some setup work for and have had no problems so far handling around 100,000 front page views a month on three servers.

I admit I was hesitant about the Linksys nature of the product but they are so cheap if you're really concerned just buy two.

Re:RV042

[kamikaze2112]

+1. I have this router and it's awesome. as of today it's been up for 173 days, and the last time it was down was because I unplugged it to re-route some wires. Can't remember how long it had been up previous to that. downside is that it's not wireless, but I have a WRT-300n running DD-WRT that I use for WiFi and I think the combination can't be beat. The VPN endpoint features on this router work quite well, so that's an added bonus too

Re:RV042

[wilson_c]

I installed a few of these for clients and they really failed to perform in a number of ways. Failover/Load balancing was unreliable when it worked at all. If you can swing it, go Sonicwall or proper Cisco appliance, if not consider DD-WRT or other open-source solutions, all of which have left me much happier than the RV042.

I remember when Slashdot was good.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now it's Slashdot - news for noobs, and even more noobish questions.

ZeroShell

[Anonymous Coward]

Setup a three+ NIC box and install ZeroShell. It supports Multi-WAN uplinks with QoS, failover, and load balancing.

Re:ZeroShell

[Anonymous Coward]

fixed link ZeroShell.

Very easy to use and setup.

Get a dual-wan router

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy a Draytek dual-WAN router. In Canada they are available via here : go-draytek.ca.

They ship to the US.

Re:Get a dual-wan router

[gpuk]

I second Draytek - they are awesome

One odd solution

[Anonymous Coward]

2 NATs in one rig. Typically this means 1 $5 PCI Etherent card. You really should be more descriptive of your needs, otherwise you're going to get vague useless information.

Linksys RV082 does this

[Anonymous Coward]

It is an older router, should be cheap on ebay. I've been using one for 8 years now with very few problems.

Pricey but works...

[Anonymous Coward]

I do this for clients frequently, generally cable/fios or cable/dsl depending on what's available. Sonicwalls do a great job as far as load balancing/failover and ease of setup (initial setup wizard allows you to configure dual wan ports). On the pricey side but they work.

Multi wan router

[prichardson]

When I google 'multi wan router' (I assume you didn't get that far), Peplink is the first result. They seem pretty legit, but I don't have any of their products. They even have one that can connect to wifi networks and ethernet for internet connectivity, which seems right up your alley.

As far as I know, just linking to routers together will not work. Your computer can only have 1 gateway (where it looks for the real internet). Maybe there's custom firmware that allows load-balancing with another router, but I doubt it.

Re:Multi wan router

[HKcastaway]

I've used PEPlink and they are good.... Recommend them, service was good, though they did bring me one which had a hardware problem.

They have some pretty good load balancing policies, but there was some wacky idea I had which it wouldn't do.

  If someone is looking for clever inbound traffic balancing without BGP google that in week or so... actually it is something similar to my DNS racing... (sorry my blog is currently down).

Re:Multi wan router

[HKcastaway]

sorry I accidental paste. Google DNS racing... i will get my blog up,

Re:Multi wan router

[Anonymous Coward]

I use the Peplink 380 in my office with two different ISPs, it works great... automatically fails over without me doing anything. It is also designed to maintain ssl/tls connections on a single ISPs so if you are browsing https sites. http://www.peplink.com/balance/tech-spec/

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[account_deleted]

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shorewall

[Anonymous Coward]

This will do the trick...

http://shorewall.net/MultiISP.html

Netgear Dual-Wan

[malachid69]

I used a Netgear Dual-WAN for years. It allows you to specify (via the web-interface) which traffic goes over which network.

Small office firewalls

[HikingStick]

Some inexpensive small office firewall appliances support multiple external network connections, and can automatically move traffic to the secondary connection if the primary goes bye-bye. I believe one such device was a Multi-Tech SOHO firewall. There are like a lot of them out there.

pfsense

[juggler314]

If you can spare/build/whatever a machcine (and really it could probably be anything from the last decade), download pfsense, the installer pretty much works, the how-to's are very detailed. It's a mature stable product. It'll let you load balance your outbound connections as well as do everything a modern firewall does (you might, for instance, find being able to setup VPN on the box highly useful).

If you don't know anything about networking it might be a bit daunting, but probably still within the realm of possibility given it's all gui based and the docs are detailed.

Use Linux

[Vrtigo1]

While there are products that do this (dual WAN firewalls, etc) none of them are particularly great. If it were me, I'd repurpose an old PC, or a dedicated board such as a Soekris 4501 (http://soekris.com/net4501.html) and roll your own. It should be pretty simple to do it with iptables and a few bash scripts. Off the top of my head, I'd do something like ping a device a few hops upstream on each providers network every 60 seconds or so, if the device isn't responding, then failover and use another script to failback when the device is reachable again.

Using linux would allow.you to incorporate traffic monitoring, QoS, etc and even a file/web/dns server if you want to. In short, the linux route keeps you from getting locked in to a proprietary system that may not meet all your needs. There's load of documentation on doing stuff like this available online, so you don't even really need any prior linux experience as long as you have a will to learn.

Re:Use Linux

[hawguy]

While there are products that do this (dual WAN firewalls, etc) none of them are particularly great. If it were me, I'd repurpose an old PC, or a dedicated board such as a Soekris 4501

Before you repurpose a PC for something that can be done by a lightweight appliance, keep in mind the power costs.

A PC that uses 100 watts will cost around $130/year in power (in California @ $.15/KWh). Use that Soekris board (at 10W w/o disk) and you save $117/year, so it will pay for itself in less than 2 years.

SYSWAN Duolinks SW24 router

[Anonymous Coward]

I am doing this myself right now using a SYSWAN Duolinks SW24 router. (The other solution I looked at (but was unfortunately out of my price range) was the Peplink Balance.) It works well, with two potential gotchas.

First, it doesn't provide link-bonding (or whatever the appropriate term is). That is, it cannot *combine* the bandwidth of the two links, but if you start downloading one file, then start a second download, (most of the time) the first download will use one connection and the second will use the other. I have two equal-bandwidth/equal-ping connections so it doesn't matter which is used. It won't download *one* file twice as fast. (It could possibly bond the two links together if you used a fancy bonding VPN endpoint somewhere, but I doubt that is what you're looking to do.)

The second gotcha has to do with dynamic DNS providers. I can control the inbound port mapping of only one of my Internet connections (WAN 1). I have port 80 (for example) on my DSL pointed at my home server. I'm using dyndns.com to keep a hostname mapped to my ever changing IP address. The Duolinks will update dyndns whenever any connection change occurs, instead of only when the IP changes on WAN 1. When it changed my dynamic hostname to my second (un-portmapped) internet connection, I couldn't get to my home machine via the hostname anymore when at the office.

Works well, pretty rock solid.

Vyatta

[Ortle]

Check out Vyatta.. they have an appliance or it can be run on a computer/VM. They have a commercial version and a community version.

Turnkey method

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy a little router from Mikrotik. Fat Swiss army knife of packet slicing and dicing, easy to use.

HSRP

[barfcat]

It seems like what you are looking for is HSRP. You have routing set up to where if the primary service goes down, the route dies and fails over to a secondary connection. I used to set this up all the time at the NSP I worked for and it was very simple. VRRP is even easier but it is Cisco proprietary and probably wouldn't fit your needs.

Re:HSRP

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems like what you are looking for is HSRP. You have routing set up to where if the primary service goes down, the route dies and fails over to a secondary connection. I used to set this up all the time at the NSP I worked for and it was very simple. VRRP is even easier but it is Cisco proprietary and probably wouldn't fit your needs.

Instead of HSRP / VRRP, just use OpenBSD's CARP... www.openbsd.org/faq for some great info... ifstated in OpenBSD can be handy for this too.

Re:HSRP

[dlb]

You got that backwards.

Re:HSRP

[barfcat]

Ah yes, right. Whoops. Been a few years since I've implemented either. Good call.

Since you have money to blow

[dlb]

Use what the grown-ups use.

Go buy yourself a Juniper SSG 20 with the optional xDSL module, and let the firewall take care of the failover for you.

~dlb

Untangle

[HockeyPUcX]

Untangle (http://www.untangle.com) may be a good option. It is relatively inexpensive and has WAN failover and load balancing capabilities with an easy to use UI if you don't want to go the 'roll your own' route.

Mikrotik

[Anonymous Coward]

A Mikrotik RB750 can be configured to do this with no problem. $40

Sonicwall

[Custard]

Since you are asking on slashdot, I am going to assume that you are geeky, but not a network person.

If you were a network person, as I am, then building a little box to route would be easy. That is what I would do. If you have more time than money, then I heartily recommend that option. There is plenty of software that will work.

Assuming that you are not a BSD/linux routing jockey, then you should look at a SonicWall or similar firewall. There are TZ100s used on eBay for less than $150. The configuration is through a simple web interface and has wizards. There are other brands, and SonicWall is quite mediocre, but I have the most familiarity with them.

Router with 2 WAN ports

[nine-times]

Basically, you need a router with 2 WAN ports and the ability to configure failover. I don't have a good recommendation, because it's a feature that generally isn't available in consumer-grade gear. Expect to spend a couple hundred dollars.

And that's just for failover. Load balancing is more complicated and often doesn't work out as well as people hope.

Re:Router with 2 WAN ports

[the eric conspiracy]

My SonicWALL has this feature.

Re:Router with 2 WAN ports

[Em Adespoton]

What I used to use for this was an ancient PC running OpenBSD off of a 1GB HDD and 256 MB RAM -- the trick was it had 5 NICs installed. Not as energy efficient as a firmware based router, but pretty easy to setup and maintain. Load balancing's not too difficult, but isn't all that advanced either. It's "good enough" for most purposes, and you can always install your own daemons to suit custom balancing requirements if you have the time+skill+requirement.

The extra 2 NICs were for my DMZ and a honeynet.

Re:Router with 2 WAN ports

[arbulus]

Seconded. A SonicWall TZ-100 (and higher models as well) can be configured for dual WAN setups.

VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol)

[microcentillion]

VRRP was created for exactly this.

Re:VRRP (Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol)

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, no, it wasn't.

no DSL, but WiFi?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pardon my ignorance, but you have WiFi (as in IEEE 802.11XX?, a.k.a. WLAN?) available, but for DSL you needed 6 km of cable?

WHERE on this planet do you live?? (or am I prejudiced when assuming you are on this planet?)

dualwanguide with a ddwrt

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.dualwanguide.com/ddwrt_dual_wan.html

Ubuntu based dual-wan routing

[ka9dgx]

I found myself in this same position a number of years ago, I've settled on using ubuntu linux, iproute2, and iptables, it's not easy to get working right, especially when you have DSL instead of a nice normal IP based connection (I will forever hate PPPoE)

The mental gymnastics of tracking ip connections across two separate routing tables in the same box will give you a few headaches, especially when a packet which comes in through the DSL heads back out the WiFi interface for no apparent reason... it's definitely not easy to get working. PPPoE imposed by our new DSL vendor added a new level of hell once we moved.

If you can find a piece of hardware which works well for less than a weeks worth of your time and effort, that has good reviews, and supports PPPoE, buy it, and don't look back.

Excuse my extreme ignorance

[MyLongNickName]

By why is this an 'Ask Slashdot'. This seems like a very straight-forward question that doesn't require opinion to answer. I am not even sure if there are multiple answers. This is one that truly can be answered with a simple Google search. Am I missing something?

Re:Excuse my extreme ignorance

[Em Adespoton]

By why is this an 'Ask Slashdot'. This seems like a very straight-forward question that doesn't require opinion to answer. I am not even sure if there are multiple answers. This is one that truly can be answered with a simple Google search. Am I missing something?

The only thing missing is that on Slashdot, you'll not only get people providing google search results, but also feedback from people who have used the various solutions, including feedback on what really works, what's easy/hard to get configured well, etc.

As you can see from the responses around yours, there are MANY answers beyond "ask google".

Then again, your comment is generic enough that it could go in ANY Ask Slashdot thread.

Of course, I googled your comment to verify you're at least not form trolling.

Draytek Vigor

[Anonymous Coward]

Try a draytek vigor

pfSense on an appliance

[Anonymous Coward]

I use a Soekris Net 5501 running pfSense to do this. The thing is bulletproof.

You can configure pfSense to use both WAN connections in a round robin arrangement. Alternatively you can set up a failover configuration where pfSense uses only the faster, higher-bandwidth connection; if that connection fails, traffic is diverted to the "backup" ISP.

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[account_deleted]

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MIKROTIK!

[Anonymous Coward]

Buy this. http://www.balticnetworks.com/mikrotik-routerboard-750.html?___store=default

Game, Set, Match.

Multiple WAN port solutions

[Anonymous Coward]

Netgear FVX538 and Netgear SRX5308.
Multiple WAN ports with load balancing and auto-failover.

Linksys RV042

[applematt84]

I have a Linksys (now called Cisco) RV042 that has a dual WAN option and even offers load balancing with the newest firmware. Great product! I believe you can even install dd-wrt on it and make it do more than it was intended for. ;)

Duolinks SW24

[droidsURlooking4]

Dual WAN Load Balancer from SYSWAN. This thing is great. Tech support out of Oregon. $175 at newegg.

myself: load-shared routing in linux, mixed result

[boss_hog]

You might want to look into load-balanced routing. I had a linux box with 3 NIC's, one NIC per ISP and one NIC to the rest of the house. I set it up for load-shared routing via the LARTC HOWTO, and for web traffic it worked ok.

I didn't stay with it because it wasn't stable for VPN connections. The decision about which upstream link to use was somehow governed by the local/remote host pairing, plus some unknown-to-me modifier. So I could establish a VPN connection, but it wouldn't keep the connection through 1 of the two links consistently. As soon as it tried to switch the VPN connection to route through the other uplink, pow, there went my VPN session. I don't recall the exact time before failure but it was less than 2 hours in most cases. made it basically unusable for me, at that time, for working from home. Perhaps that's solved(or can be configured around) by now.

I don't know/remember how it works for p2p either, though, since it was so long ago and the decision about which upstream path for any outbound traffic to take is controlled by the kernel on that routing box.

here's the relevant section of the LARTC HOWTO, in case you want to read more or try it out:
http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html#AEN298

Won't be easy .. or simple.

[n5vb]

I see people trying this all the time, and there's one unavoidable bump in that road: connecting from two totally different public IP's in two totally different IP blocks that are native to two totally different DNS domains. DNS can be worked around to some extent by going to a common DNS server that's outside, and visible from, both domains, like Google or OpenDNS, but that runs into issues resolving in-network hostnames because a lot of ISP's provide different IP's for in-network vs out-of-network services, which can impact email and some streaming services to third party set-top devices pretty heavily. And the in-network services you're connecting to may not know how to handle you if you connect to an externally resolved IP from an in-network address block.

It's *possible* you could hack a home server/router combo to provide split DNS that will resolve properly to in-network services on both connections properly, but that configuration (and routing appropriately to separate WAN's on separate networks) is *very* non-trivial and will be squirrelly as hell if it's not tuned just right, and possibly just squirrelly as hell, period.

Honestly, I'd set up your local router/WAP for a network that's separate from your neighborhood wifi's SSID and just switch networks as needed..

Re:Won't be easy .. or simple.

[bsquizzato]

DNS doesn't have to be an issue, if the router can forward DNS requests. Most of the time in a simple home network the router serves as the name server for all the hosts inside the private network. It gets the real DNS IPs from the WAN, but all your hosts point to the inside router IP and it forwards DNS requests along.

It sounds like he wants to use the DSL as a *backup* for his Wifi, not run them both at the same time with complete split routing. But even still, you might be able to statically configure the router DNS and enter in both ISP's name servers. That way it'll do a lookup to both ISPs for a given hostname.

There are a few dual-WAN routers

[BenEnglishAtHome]

At home, I have both cable and DSL. I use a Vigor2930N from DrayTek.

Works like a charm.

There have been other mentions of a Cisco/Linksys product (the 104, I believe) but I went with the Draytek because I wanted integrated wireless, too.

Re:There are a few dual-WAN routers

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Correction - The Cisco/Linksys model that was mentioned by another poster was the RV042. I owned and had less-than-good experiences with the RV082.

Re:dual wan router

[Anonymous Coward]

Aren't you just the very model of a courteous, considerate and empathetic piece of human excrement?

Use a cable modem and DSL at the same time.

[John Sokol]

I did a blog post on this very topic last year.

http://johnsokol.blogspot.com/2010/11/increasing-internet-reliablity-dual-wan.html

Use a cable modem and DSL at the same time.
Xincom XC-DPG502
TP-Link TL-R480T+

pfSense on a NetGate for about $200

[Anonymous Coward]

http://store.netgate.com/Netgate-m1n1wall-2D2-Black-P220C83.aspx

I agree, wholeheartedly, from experience

[BenEnglishAtHome]

I had the Cisco/Linksys and experienced endless frustration. I wound up replacing it with a Draytek Vigor 2930N. The 2930 works great and provides integrated wireless, to boot. Love it.

More info.

Re:I agree, wholeheartedly, from experience

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Correction - I had the RV082. It was still a bad experience.

Curiosity

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of curiosity why does anyone need ISP redundancy in a home setting? I'm guessing everyone that needs this is a remote tech contractor/employee of some sort, but I am curious if there are other reasons.

Re:Curiosity

[micheas]

If you are using voip you might find that a second internet connection might be nice./

For a lot of things it is much easier to deal with your ISP (especially trouble tickets) if you have internet access.

If you have comcast/xfinity or some other ISP that disconnects users for TOS violations without enough warning to get another service, a hot spare might be useful.

I am sure there are other reasons.

If you like DIY try this approach or a similar one

[ghomem]

Here is something that may help you. Note that this will get you the public IPs directly to the WAN interfaces and requires bridged mode on the CPE: http://blog.angulosolido.pt/2008/03/intelligent-linux-gateway-multihoming_04.html There is also a (warning) very bad video about it: http://blog.angulosolido.pt/2008/03/intelligent-linux-gateway-bad-video.html

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[account_deleted]

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Shorewall

[Anonymous Coward]

We used to use shorewall traffic shaping at $company. http://www.shorewall.net/simple_traffic_shaping.html

If you can manage Linux, it's doable. Otherwise, I would try and get a higher-end dual wan router or such. I guess it depends on your budget, motivation and time.

DDWRT or Tomato-compatible router

[guruevi]

Those Linux-based routers do very well. I have an Asus RT-N16 and this should be able to route both WiFi and up to 5 Ethernet links (each port is separately addressable). There are also specific dual-wan routers but the hardware and software is identical, the configuration changes. There is an example on the DD-WRT wiki on how to set up iptables so any Linux distro would work just as well. If you run out of resources on those ARM devices (Linksys hardware is particularly underpowered for anything beyond 10Mbps) you can get a cheap VIA system with a couple of decent PCI wireless and wired cards.

Mikrotik Routerboard

[DeadboltX]

http://routerboard.com/RB750

Small, cheap, highly configurable.
It has 5 ports that you can configure as wans or link them together as lans. There is also a gigabit version available.

You can do everything on this as you would on a homebrewed freebsd solution, but with a nice gui or an optimized cli.

Re:Mikrotik Routerboard

[Anonymous Coward]

And use less power too! I discovered these while looking for a small low power SBC to use for a "roll your own" router, and they provided all the desired features out of the box.

Re:Mikrotik Routerboard

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 on the small Mikrotik RouterBoard devices. The flexibility of dd-wrt, pfsense, or other "roll your own" distro, in a COTS package. Very capable little routers (the CLI reminds me a lot of configuring Cisco hardware) that don't cost an arm and a leg. All you need is enough networking know how to configure the device to do what you want, and on that front their forums and wiki include lots of examples.

Link Balancer

[claytongulick]

I did a website for a client who sells and configure devices like this for schools and libraries under the federal e-rate program. I don't have personal experience with the device, but he says it works quite well. Here's a link (disclaimer: like I mentioned, I developed the web site for this, but I'm not affiliated with the product) http://e-rateforschools.com/services/e-rate-internet-availability-link-balancers/

-Clay

You won't get what you think....

[EriktheGreen]

If what you're looking for is A) Fail-over, so if one ISP or line is down you use the other or B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other, a dual WAN setup will work for you using one of the dual WAN setups people have mentioned. They're basically hacks that masquerade your desktop behind a public IP address from whichever provider you happen to be using at any moment. They don't allow asymmetric traffic (can't send packets out one ISP and receive via the other ISP) and they'll possibly screw up any security protocol or site that expects to see packets coming from a single IP and port address. This is handy, but only slightly more convenient than moving the cable yourself and re-issuing a DHCP request. Forget about aggregating bandwidth, you won't get that.

If you're thinking that hooking up both ISPs to a router will let you use whichever one is faster for any site when you click on it, you can't do that without a ton of work (and for the most part without being an ISP). The problem is that although a routing protocol exists on the global internet that would let your router figure out which path is best to each network prefix, to use it you have to have your own routing block (an aggregate of multiple network addresses) to announce to the world (which you can't get) and you have to have a router capable of holding and processing the global BGP table in real time... you don't have this.

If only all our home routers could speak a multi path routing protocol with low overhead, every single packet we sent would take the best path to its destination, all our computers would automatically fail over to other connections, we could add bandwidth by plugging in another wire, we could add and remove bandwidth in real time as needed, and we could migrate between internet providers without re-numbering our IP addresses. Things like mobile apps would be much easier to write.. no need to use a central server to pass data to a mobile, just send the packets to its IP and the routing protocol would send them on to wherever it's connected in the net.

I look forward to the day when the Internets evolve to permit multiple pathing for data in real time. Too bad technological development of Internet protocols seems to have slowed and become heavily political.

Erik

Re:You won't get what you think....

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to pull a full internet routing table to run BGP for redundancy. If he doesn't care about BGP best path selection he can set a default route to both ISP's and load balance that way.

Re:You won't get what you think....

[Anonymous Coward]

If your ISPs both provide a proxy cache (unusual these days), set up your own instance of squid to check both.

With the growth in dynamic html, this is less useful than it used to be

Re:You won't get what you think....

[zbobet2012]

Way to be... wrong. While he won't be able to do "intelligent" routing since almost no ISP advertises the routing information that deep into the network.

Set up a linux box with dual NIC's and iptables and load something like this:

http://tetro.net/misc/multilink.html

Or This:

http://blog.khax.net/2009/12/01/multi-gateway-balancing-with-iptables/

Or This:

http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html/p Yeah...

Re:You won't get what you think....

[Anonymous Coward]

All of your post is correct. But I was thinking that arguably distributed networking systems like bittorrent (DHT) and freenet already do this, albeit in the application layer. They rely on cryptographic hashes which just give a HIGHLY PROBABLE path to an address and not necessarily the exact one that BGP would provide in a similar scenario. The path would be many hops through many others' computers. Likewise, an open mesh routing system like you describe would require you to put a lot of trust in your neighbors.

Re:You won't get what you think....

[EriktheGreen]

From my original post: "B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other"

That's all those are. All you can do is configure them statically, using tables. So as I said, you won't automatically get the best path to any given site, which is what you would have with BGP or a similar routing protocol that would work on home sized connections.

Don't get me wrong, mapping traffic to interfaces statically is handy, but it's a hack compared to a real multi-homing system.

Erik

PS: Slashdot, for the love of God step into the last decade and install a post editor with formatting. Manual HTML sucks.

Cable and DSL?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have Comcast, which is expensive at over $60 / month, but I get 10-20M downstream (10M nominal).

AT&T is offering DSL for less than $20, but I'm 13,000 feet from the modem (by wire. By car it's only 1300 feet) Last year their website said they provide service in my area, but when the technician came out and measured it, he said the signal was too weak. This year I checked again, and their website has been updated to show what kind of service they offer to my address, and it said 700K nominal. No way was I going to downgrade to less than 10% of my current throughput.

I guess if you only have wireless internet, DSL could be an alternative. But DSL at 19,000 feet? It must be like 256K. That's slower than dialup, isn't it?

On the other hand, with wireless and DSL, maybe you could configure your router to send some packets to one ISP and some to the other, like a reverse loaed balancer.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Zeroshell

[Anonymous Coward]

I run several of these. They are both VM machines and loaded from a cd with persistant storage.

http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/

Look at the net balancer option, you can split traffic using any iptables rules and it has an excellect web ui. Full shell to linux if you want to get dirty too.

Use a Linux box

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe follow a guide like this?

http://parkersamp.com/2010/03/howto-using-linux-as-a-simple-load-balancer-nat-router-firewall/

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Juniper SSG5

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is in your price range, you could look at the Juniper SSG5. Runs about $500. It supports eBGP, OSPF, RIP, ECMP, VPN tunnels, etc... You can have as many WAN connection as ports on the router. I use them pretty much everywhere for my small business clients - you cannot beat them for the flexibility and feature set at that price.

http://www.juniper.net/us/en/products-services/security/ssg-series/ssg5/#literature

Re:dual wan router

[nedlohs]

No I'm the real thing, not a model.

Syswan Octolinks

[NewWorldDan]

I've been using a Syswan Octolinks for years with no problems, because at one point I had 3 connections to manage.

I also have a Barracuda Link Balancer that I'm rather underwhelmed with. The DHCP server on the unit seems to crash every few months, and Barracuda support was no help, so the solution was simply to use something else to provide DHCP services.

Ideas

[Anonymous Coward]

Some suggestions for you:
Watchguard firewalls are all multi-wan capable and are nice units.

If cash is an issue and you have an old box lying around, run PFSense

Mushroom Networks

[haulbag]

I once saw a presentation about the products from Mushroom Networks. As I recall, they basically are running a small Linux box and are aggregating bandwidth at the link level of the OSI model. Based on the product, you can plug in multiple (5 to 6) Ethernet connections or even USB connections to wireless cellular data cards. This is probably more of a small to mid-sized office product.

I'm not sure on the pricing. Here's a blurb from their site on one of their products:

"The Porcini BBNA (Broadband Bonding Network Appliance), is a one-sided Internet bonding appliance that provides aggregated Internet connectivity to home offices who wish to aggregate multiple Internet access lines for increased performance and reliability in a cost-effective way. With the Porcini BBNA, multiple DSL, cable modem or T1 services can be combined to provide higher speed and more reliable Internet access.

"The Porcini BBNA combines multiple Internet access lines, each on a 10/100baseT Ethernet interface, into a single aggregated Internet access line for HTTP downlink traffic, again on a 10/100baseT Ethernet interface. The aggregation over the Internet access lines is done even for a single download session, providing the full aggregate speed. Additionally, session based intelligent load-balancing is provided for both non-http downlink and uplink traffic as well as inbound load-balancing. The Porcini BBNA4422 supports aggregation of up to 4 Internet access lines plus one USB based cellular data card as the 5th WAN. Each Internet access line may be through a DSL modem, cable modem, T1, satellite modem, fractional DS3, DS3, fiber, cellular or any other broadband connection. For uplink bonding capabilities, please see our TRUFFLE product line."

Look for a multi WAN router

[Anonymous Coward]

There are routers that specifically support multiple WAN connections for redundancy or load sharing. They take care of the job of modifying routing tables so that bad things don't happen. The biggest users of this stuff are businesses, so expect higher prices (and, hopefully, better quality).
http://www.peplink.com/balance/

I've had good results with peplink's WiFi gateways, but have tried the multi-WAN stuff myself.
-Dan

Funny you mention this

[Anonymous Coward]

I was looking up how to do a backup/failover link via Cisco ASAs yesterday after a friend mentioned getting a second link. Hardware is pricier than your normal at home router, but it's a thought.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/vpndevc/ps2030/products_configuration_example09186a00806e880b.shtml

It's far better than you expect

[swb]

It's probably cost prohibitive for some SOHO setup, but I think some of the mid-tier firewall and link balancer products will support sticky connections and/or policy routing specific IPs and URLs.

I've installed a half-dozen or so Ecessa PowerLinks and have not had any problems with users being unable to get to or work with specific sites, even though it works as you generally suggest (although they use a dummy LAN between the PowerLink and your internal firewall).

The same is true for Watchguard Firebox firewalls with the Fireware Pro software level and multi-wan.

IMHO, the bigger issue is failover that doesn't leave something to be desired. Most products I've worked with tend to want to use ping or, slightly better, TCP connects to static IPs on a per-interface basis to test to see if there's a network there. It's all well and good, but false positives/negatives are tough to avoid.

A big chunk of the problem is that you want to test something on the internet and not served, co-hosted or part of your ISPs network -- you want to make sure you can get past the ISP.

Ping is nearly useless across the public internet as a rule, unless you have a host you can ping and expect a packet back. TCP connect is a lot smarter, but the whole static IP thing is a huge problem unless you frequently check and validate IPs regularly or are using known statics. It'd be far more helpful to use DNS names that were cached and refreshed periodically, but I haven't seen any devices designed for this.

Check Out this Internet Connection Mgmt Product

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out this product called OASIS.

http://onlight.com/oasis.php

It is described as follows:

"Our engineers have perfected a line of devices that intelligently manage two or more Internet connections to keep businesses connected. We call these devices OASIS."

Sweet

Dual ISP Connections at Home

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in a similar situation except I am using the Cable Company Internet connection to connect my server(s) to the Internet while the Wireless Company Internet connection is intended for my desktop/notebook computer. I have the Wireless Company connection via an Ethernet cable and the Cable Company connection via WiFi to another router; these connections are to my desktop/notebook computer. When I need to switch between the two networks I use Network Manager / Network Configuration utility in PCLinuxOS and it works smoothly to the point that I can rejoin a previous ssh connection, for example, to the servers after having been connected to the other router. My cable ISP is unlimited data whereas my wireless carrier ISP is tiered pricing with a 3GB minimum and 10GB maximum before overages kick in to the billing.

arno iptables

[Sxooter]

I setup a dual homed network system in about 5 minutes with arno iptables in ubuntu. Super simple and very reliable and easy to setup.

Cisco ASA 5505

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure you can do this with a Cisco ASA - although they're meant more for offices, they should work in the home just as well. The ASA 5505 is reasonably priced.

OS X: Sustworks IPNRX

[cmholm]

Sustworks IPNRX (IP Network Router X) will also do this on a Mac, even over multiple USB NICs on a Mini: http://www.sustworks.com/site/prod_ipnrx_help/html/AlternateRouteHelp.html

Or save yourself some money if you know networking

[syousef]

Buy a router and put DDWRT on it (lots of advantages, certain routers well supported) then use one of the LAN ports as your WAN port
http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Dual_WAN
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:gIv7HeSGSCcJ:www.sbhacker.net/forum/index.php/topic/5903-dual-wan-guide-for-dd-wrt-routers/+tomato+dual+lan&cd=7&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

DD-WRT

[Anonymous Coward]

Try a suitable router loaded with DD-WRT.

http://www.roadrunnerguide.com/dualwan.html

1 computer, 2 nic's

[holophrastic]

Many decent motherboards these days have dual network chips. But you can take any old computer and shove three network cards into it. I presume your favourite operating system can share it's internet access.

So that's what I'd do -- in part because I'm not a networking kind of guy, and in part because I know it'll work. One computer, in the basement, with both ISPs going into the computer, running windows -- vista or 7. One network cable out of that computer to my home router. That's it.

It's also really easy to debug. That computer either has internet access or it doesn't; and you've got all of windows to help you ensure that it always does. Everything else can just feed off of it.

And if you're anything like me, you undoubtedly have an old computer lying around, and at least five old network cards. So you can prototype it in an hour. Then just get some good quality network cards.

Sonicwall TZ-170

[Anonymous Coward]

We use a Sonicwall TZ-170 (no doubt replaced by something else now). It offered three network ports -- internal LAN, WAN and 'OPT'. WAN and OPT are assigned to our two ISPs -- a local WiFi vendor (fast but unreliable) and satellite (slow but very reliable). We have played around with a couple of failover and load balancing strategies and they all have their flaws. The least disfunctional for us has been to route traffic through the faster port with failover to the surviving service. We tried rounrobin, balancing traffic between them, etc -- all the possibilities available had their own quirks. And some services have to go through specific paths, so those connections will just be blocked when the link is AWOL. Failover is established by probing resources on the vendor network every couple of minutes -- because these are unreliable, the Sonicwall considers it a success if any of the probes succeed (there are a number of choices). With the WiFi, the remote end of the wireless link is always there but the ISPs DNS servers are up and down. It is a different combination for the satellite -- one just has to experiment to see what works. It is never seamless, but waiting a few minutes while the system reconfigures itself is a lot better than swapping cables. And besides, there will be those days when both of them are down.

Dual wan Router

[Syirrus]

I recently a dual wan router (Cisco RV042 Dual WAN VPN Router) to connect two DSL lines and it works great. I purchased mine at Microcenter.

Re:Dual wan Router

[masonc]

I use a three interface linux box with Shorewall http://www.shorewall.net/MultiISP.html
as the firewall software. Shorewall allows you to do Multi-ISP routing but does not do dynamic routing so you have to restart the software to change the routing. Dynamic routing based on link quality of very hard to do properly.

and here is how to make clickable links...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+do+I+make+links+on+slashdot+comments%3F&l=1

Dual WAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at this site for using dual WAN connections: http://chris.olstrom.com/howto/setup-dual-wan/
It allows you to use the speed of both internet connections. You just have to use multiple connections to a site (load 2 pages, etc). I have not tested how it will react if one of the connections is pulled, but it should recognize that it has no connection and move to the other table. I used this at a friend's apartment where they gave him "free" internet, but capped his speed per nic. We setup a VM with 10 vnics and were able to use the speed of all of them at once.

multiple wan solution for linux

[six]

Mpath-tools is a set of programs for linux 2.6+ that aim to facilitate load balancing and failover over multiple and heterogeneous ISP connections.

Elegant solutions

[Khyber]

Simple, build a routing computer, use it to switch when wireless connectivity isn't meeting your demands.

Anyone else suggesting anything else is just shilling for some company or another.

You cannot use two private addr routers as a dest.

[Anonymous Coward]

While you can have traffic that follows different paths in the network - you can't expect to have one connection shared across two public WAN connections that have different public IP addresses. The best you will do with the Internet is to send one connection one way and the next the other way. You get load balancing and HA/reliability but you don't get combined bandwidth.

That will only ever work when the user is directly publicly addressable using the same IP address on both of the router. I am a network engineer and once I erroneously tried to do this.

Frontier?

[calidoscope]

Sounds like you are in what used to be Northern Ohio Telephone Co territory. NOTC was bought by GTE in 1968, the phone portion of GTE merged with Bell Atlantic to form Verizon in 1999, then Verizon spinning off a bunch of their business the last few years.

Re:Frontier?

[wolrahnaes]

I think you're on the nose. I knew the area as "GTE North" and yea, they sold it off to Frontier a few years ago after teasing us with a test-market of FiOS in a few small towns. I'm glad to have moved to a larger town where the LEC is still Frontier, but the cable options aren't shit (50/5 truly unlimited with no complaints from the ISP when I use 2TB in a month for $129) so their offerings are pretty much irrelevant. The cable company has a nice cheap tier, so no one gets DSL unless they don't know any better.

Sonicwalls

[Anonymous Coward]

We've found Sonicwalls to be the only small-business grade router to be able to effectively load-balance two connections without breaking the bank. It's actually surprising how hard it is to find a router that will load-balance correctly. I've worked with a variety of soft-routers, cisco and cisco smb equipment and fund that bang for buck, the sonicwalls are the only ones that produce real results. This opinion comes from many real-life dual-wan setups, and I've found time and time again that the homebrew solution didn't stack up.

Don't ignore the benefit of redundant set-ups

[cachorro]

A while back our house had both dsl and cable, one dedicated to my wife's business, and one for my convenience. Both were run into dedicated old boxes running openbsd firewalls. Each box used the same intranet prefix (192.168.5.x), but one box was two and the other ten on our intranet. Under normal circumstances my network and my wife's were not wired together. Benefits were:

.
1) My major uploads/downloads would not slow down her business and vice versa.

2) My investigation of NSFW websites would never be traced back to her business (although I know there a better ways around that).

3) If her network was down, I could run a cat-5 to her switch from mine and change her gateway machine setting temporarily and she was back up, and vice-versa.

4) If (slim chance) either of the firewall machines were to be hacked, presumably the other would remain un-hacked, and available.

Anyway, it worked for us.

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[shenzhen12345]

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Simples

[persevero]

Look at Sharedband: http://www.sharedband.com/.

OSM

[drago]

Time to put that nice collection of data into Openstreetmap. Volunteers?

may be ...ASG?

[vikarti]

may be cheap atom box + ASG(Astaro Security Gateway,www.astaro.com(forums at astaro.org)) with free Home Edition license Potential Issues: - it probable will use more power than regular router after all - max 50 IPs behind it(but it's for home after all) - if want to you use ASG's extended funcionality(web filtering, advanced IPS(snort-based),etc) you will need to choose CPU carefully - you will have root password from ASG(it's really very specilized Linux) but it is assumed that you will use web-based control tools I use old athlon machine with 1.5 Gb RAM and some old hdd(and 3 network cards) as my ASG router

Re:Or save yourself some money if you know network

[qpqp]

Do yourself a favor and choose openWRT instead, which is truly open source. www.openwrt.org

Vyatta

[Anonymous Coward]

Set up a Vyatta Router/Firewall. It does a great job of load balancing and fail over. You just need three NICs to set it up. We use Vyatta everywhere and have had no problems. It just works!

Mikrotik makes a suitable device.

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the Mikrotik SOHO routers, they're very capable, very reasonably priced (under $75 for the RB750G), and commonly used for just this kind of application. They're less well known in the US than the usual consumer brands because mostly aimed at commercial users, for setting up kiosks, access points, hot spots, and the like. They also need a bit more networking savvy to configure than the average consumer device, but that's just the price of more capabilities.