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

Posted by timothy on from the cut-the-blue-wire-no-the-red-wire-hmmm dept.

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?"

1 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. What I did. by grub · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Trolling is a art,