Dual WAN linux box

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Kendrak

[H]ard|DCer of the Year 2009
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Is there a distro out there that will do this? Or maybe even something like smoothwall?

I want to have DSL and a Cable modem going into one router/network.

This way I can game, but If the wife wants to do something online, or a boxen in my folding farm decides to upload, it does not kill the overall connection.

 
hmmmm, well that sucks. I know ClarkConnect and Vyatta have open-source projects but I am not sure if the free versions support dual-WAN or not. I know MikroTik RouterOS supports multi-WAN, but I know that isn't free. . . . . .
 
If i remember correctly vyatta can do load balancing.

here is a link on there forum with a sample setup of load balancing
 
I think you have the wrong idea here, games don't eat up an entire cable connection these days, a better and cheaper choice would be to just do a little QoS (quality of service) most of your linux firewall distros are capable of this, it can basically say that traffic from Game X gets priority, so if a folding machine uploads, it doesn't eat the connection. You could also go further and allocate a certain amount for web traffic.
 
Kendrak said:
Is there a distro out there that will do this? Or maybe even something like smoothwall?

I want to have DSL and a Cable modem going into one router/network.

This way I can game, but If the wife wants to do something online, or a boxen in my folding farm decides to upload, it does not kill the overall connection.

Click to expand...

You can solve that without going to multi WAN, which itself probably would not get you your desired result.

I run PFSense at home. It has superior traffic shaping/QOS features. You can prioritize game traffic, and you can de-prioritize web traffic, and other types of "downloading" traffic. You can even cap download traffic rates.

With a normal router, if I'm playing online, and the wife and kid are heavily surfing, my pings go up. If the kid decides to download something, my pings go through the roof. Trying to talk on Vonage IP phone when someone else is doing heavy activity online ended up with very poor phone quality. With PFSense, I gave top priority to gaming traffic, and VoIP. I dropped priority to web traffic, and I heavily crippled downloading..esp P2P traffic, going a step further and capping that at 256/128 (on my 6,000/384 cable). This way...no matter what others are doing online..my online pings are always rock stable and low, and the Vonage phone is always OK.
 
Take a look at zeroshell. It should handle your needs no problem. It might take some time to learn if you are unfamiliar with Linux, but it works very well once it is running. We have set it up for a few of our clients who wanted to implement load balancing & fault-tolerance on their networks. It works exceptionally well for load balancing VPN's as well.
 
Kendrak said:
looked good until that :eek:

Click to expand...

You mis-read. That particular limitation is for running redundant firewalls with CARP (2 firewalls where if one fails the other takes over). For dual upstream there is no limitation against using DHCP on the upstream link, I can assure you as I have looked into how this is implemented in OpenBSDs PF (where FreeBSD/m0n0wall/PFsense gets it from).
 
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