WAN load balancing

[tiebird321]

so because of the recent huricanes droping telephone lines left and right
the telephone company redid the lines....
cept they did a craptacualr job doing it
so my very happy line that was syncing at 6.0/1.5
will only work reliably now at 1.5/768....
so because of the SLA i have with my ISP
the ISP has offered to install a second line
to get me back up to 3.0/1.5 at a base minimum

the problem i have is how to load balance the 2 lines

what i figured i might be able to use would be an old base 10 core router that has multiple WAN ports...
but i'm not to sure about it
the thing does not need to do DCHP or firewall

the way i have things set up is as follows
i have a house/small buisness network running dhcp behind a nat firewall/router
there is a freebsd server for the buisness
and then there is the singular adsl modem
the router and the server each use a static IP addr
and the router server and adsl modem are connected together via a base 100 hub

i want to keep it the way it is and just add a device between the hub and the now 2 adsl modems

is there any way to do this using hardware
or using a p3 500 box runing debian and software with like 3 lan cards

thanx for any help at all

 

[Bullitt]

You can do something like that with IPtables (your debian suggestion). To get true load balancing, yer gonna have to have full control over routing tables at the ISP (ie, aint gonna happen).

At any rate I've done this with debian with a 3 interface box and 2 dsl lines. All TCP traffic was sent across a high-bandwidth, _high_ latency (70 ping. 4mbit down/1mb up) dsl and all UDP traffic was sent across a low-bandwidth, _low_ latency (10 ping 768d/768u) dsl line. Yah, downloads versus gaming...
Anyways, its possible, my results were effective, but not elegant. It would screw up on p2p stuff and anything that initiated a UDP connection and then a TCP connection (or so it seemed). I abandoned it when I moved and got one of our engineers to create a custom profile for me that gave me the bandwidth and the pings I wanted.

To do the "load balancing" the lartc indicates that the effect is going to not be effective for a small lan, but the larger the number of machines (10+) it would be effective. That solution only evenly distributes access to the bandwidth evenly, it does not allow you to take 2 1.5 lines and somehow get 3 down from the same connection. It will however, allow you to get 3 down overall, just not all at once from 1 place.

www.lartc.org for starters.


There are hardware appliances out there, but they're a load of BS.

 

[tiebird321]

ts actualy many small connections
for the download i have 2 things happening
usualy about 10 computers at once doing windows updates....
(still wishing akami would let me have a server here at the house)
and a computer running BT to grab anime (non licensed stuff)

upload wise i have the BT usualy limited to 10k per conection
and what ever the webserver is uploading

i dont need the fat pipe for one computer/one connection
like i said its more of load balencing so it directs traffic connections to whichever pipe has more free space

 

[Bullitt]

In that case, LARTC has some valuable info and some good conceptual help to get you started. I'm not an IP Tables guru but I was able to figure it out after a few hours and accomplish what I needed.

You will undoubtedly be able to do the same. Of course, I had to consume a lot of Bass before my mind was relaxed enough and then it was a lightbulb in my head and 20 lines of script later, blammo, I was done.