[H-GEN] Load balancing

[Christopher Biggs]

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Robert Brockway <robert at timetraveller.org> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:

> On Tue, 8 Jul 2003, Joe Skilton wrote:
>
>> Most of our traffic is purely small persistant connections to game servers
>> and I was under the impression that if I balance outgoing connections
>> correctly the incoming packets would return over the same PPP link,
>
> Incoming return packets need not travel anything like the path the
> original outgoing packets took.  Some ISPs regularly engage in "triangular
> routing" where the incoming and outgoing data streams are on competely
> different physical network channels - eg, IHUG the Satellite ISP in NZ
> routes downstream data to you via a Satellite dish and upstream via a
> secondary link that might be modem, isdn or adsl, and need not even be
> connected to one of their Points of Presence (ie, it can be connected to
> any other ISP).

But if you have *Point-to-Point* links (dialup PPP or PPPoE), and
they're on different subnets, then if your proxy binds the outgoing
proxy connection to the local endpoint address of the PPP link (using
NAT, or transport-layer proxying), you are virtually guaranteed that
returning traffic must use the same link.  The path beyond that is out
of your control, but if all you care about is link balancing, you're
home.

--cjb



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