CentOS - Feb 2008 - Internet Load Balancing and Failover

Hi All,

Does anyone have any experience connecting two or more DSL/Cable modems to 
a Linux box to provide load balancing and failover?

I've done some googling and found a few resources but very few solid 
experiences.

I'm trying to optimize my LAN->Internet traffic for a bunch of 
workstations.

Shawn

Shawn Everett wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Does anyone have any experience connecting two or more DSL/Cable modems to
> a Linux box to provide load balancing and failover?
I haven't tried this on linux but it appears trivial in OpenBSD:
http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/pools.html#outgoing

I personally prefer OpenBSD for firewalls/gateways over Linux.
I love linux for pretty much all purposes except firewalls/gateways,
and I don't use OpenBSD for anything other than firewalls/gateways.
Mainly because of packet filter(pf), it's a wonderful tool.

I tried looking at some documentation for iptables for doing the
same thing but it was pretty vague. I didn't notice anything
similar to what pf can do in the document above. Closest I found
was:
http://www.netfilter.org/documentation/HOWTO//NAT-HOWTO-6.html#ss6.3

Which says if a range of IPs is given it can balance based on
the least currently used IP. But no indications of whether or
not you can use IPs from different subnets(from the above, I
assume not).

nate

Shawn Everett wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Does anyone have any experience connecting two or more DSL/Cable modems to 
> a Linux box to provide load balancing and failover?
> 
> I've done some googling and found a few resources but very few solid 
> experiences.
> 
> I'm trying to optimize my LAN->Internet traffic for a bunch of 
> workstations.
I'd suggest using PfSense for that.  It is based on FreeBSD, but using 
OpenBSD's PF as packet filter.  Commercial grade features in this free 
firewall, definitely a lot easier to configure and maintain than a linux 
box for this kind of tasks.

Regards,

Ugo