Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Linux and Multiple Internet Uplinks: a New Tool

Posted by Soulskill on from the fault-tolerance-for-all dept.

New submitter Alessandro Zarrilli writes: Linux has been able do multipath routing for a long time: it means being able to have routes with multiple gateways and to use them in a (weighted) round-robin fashion. But Linux is missing a tool to actively monitor the state of internet uplinks and change the routing accordingly. Without it, from a LAN perspective, it's like having a RAID-0: just one uplink goes down and all of your LAN-to-WAN traffic goes down too. Documentation and examples on the subject are lacking; existing solutions are few and deeply integrated in firewall/routing specific distributions. To address these issues, a new standalone tool was just released: Fault Tolerant Router. It also includes a complete (iptables + ip policy routing) configuration generator.

2 of 80 comments (clear)

  1. OpenWRT with mwan3 by AlreadyStarted · · Score: 5, Informative

    OpenWRT package mwan3 has similar functionality without the complication of multipath.

    http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/ho...

  2. Many other tools for multipath by klapaucjusz · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a lot of multipath-related work being done right now, at the IETF, within OpenWRT, and independently.

    We've been working on providing multiple routes automatically (disclaimer -- I'm a co-author). As to actually making use of the multiple routes, the solution that currently works best is MP-TCP, a set of kernel patches that allows TCP to use multiple routes simultaneously, with no modification to applications. Other solutions are SHIM6, which works below the transport layer, and Multipath Mosh, which works at the application layer.

    I'm pretty confident we'll be able to have most of this stuff enabled by default in mainstream Linux distributions by the end of the year.