LARTC - Mar 2004 - load balance a file download across two connections - success!

First of all, thanks to this group for the awesome documentation on the 
load balancing and thanks to http://www.ssi.bg/~ja/nano.txt. I''m now 
balancing a DSL and Cable Modem account (DSL is 1.5/768 and Cable is 
3/256). It took some work but I learned a lot along the way.

For a few sites that I tend to download a lot from, I found that I could 
configure Flashget (http://www.amazesoft.com/) to use its
''multiproxy'' in
a way that would enable me to split the download. The setting was 
originally designed to help you make multiple connections to a download 
site via different proxy servers, thus bypassing a max connection limit. 
What I did instead was just define fake proxies (actually the real site) 
with the only difference being the port. This way Flashget breaks up the 
download into some pieces on 80, some on port 81. Of course, the site you 
are downloading from must support multiple ports. Many news servers 
support multiple ports to assist users getting around any firewall 
restrictions, etc.

After configuring Flashget I made some rules on my linux load balancer 
saying that port 80 (to the specific ip) goes out the cable modem, port 81 
out the DSL. I realized 550KB download speed! Here''s a screenshot:
http://www.burnpc.com/images/flashget1file544KB.gif

Here''s what I did in my shell script:
echo "balancing easynews..."
EASYNEWS="140.99.99.100"
$IPTABLES -A PREROUTING -i $IFI -t mangle -p tcp --dport 80 -j MARK 
--set-mark 1
$IPTABLES -A PREROUTING -i $IFI -t mangle -p tcp --dport 81 -j MARK 
--set-mark 2
# I manually added tables 206 and 207 to rt_tables, but for a one time 
config you could uncomment
# the two lines below
#echo 206 easynews1.out >> /etc/iproute2/rt_tables
#echo 207 easynews2.out >> /etc/iproute2/rt_tables
ip rule add fwmark 1 table easynews1.out
ip rule add fwmark 2 table easynews2.out
ip route add $EASYNEWS via $GWE1 dev $IFE1 table easynews1.out
ip route add $EASYNEWS via $GWE2 dev $IFE2 table easynews2.out

For my full script you can look here: 
http://www.burnpc.com/website.nsf/all/FE5F4F294F508EB786256E600019BC30


HTH,
-Ron