[H-GEN] Load balancing

[R&J Stuart]

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Greg Black wrote:

>>                     At work I am looking at getting 2 1.5m/bit DSL
>>connections(we currently have one).  A FreeBSD box is using PPP nat to route
>>our current connection effectively, but i'm a little worried about what
>>might happen when two PPP connections are available on the one machine, will

[snip]

> This is Not Easy -- but it has been covered about a million
> times on the FreeBSD list devoted to this subject.  Read the
> archives of the net at FreeBSD.org list and you'll get lots of
> information.

No experience doing this with FreeBSD, but in general load balancing 
situations, the short answer is that you can do a lot at your own end 
and therefore control OUTGOING traffic (traf headed away from you) with 
no problem.  The bigger issue is getting stuff load balanced from the 
other end - the other end is where you usually want share the load (ADSL 
is all about downloading isn't it), you can't do that without the help 
of the ISP.  If you can't get help from your ISP, there probably isn't 
much point in persuing this too much further; at best you'll be able to 
do some very coarse LB.  You said DSL not ADSL, so load balancing from 
your end might be good enough (eg round robin webserving etc).

Regards,

Robert


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