Craig Roy wrote:
Hi David,
If you mean to aggregate or multilink connections by the term "Bonding",
currently it is not possible and no hardware currently supports this that I
am aware of. Many manufacturers currently support Load Balance and Failover,
but not Aggregating. (Aggregating means to join connections to make one
connection over multiple links)
Also if you do your research, you will probably find hardware cheaper than
what your ISP will supply.
But as a user of PFSense, I don’t know of any Router Hardware that will
allow you to install more than 1GB of RAM. CISCO doesn’t supply this and if
they did no-one could afford it.
PFSense when load balance for Outgoing, the first users request will go out
the Primary connection and the second user will go out the secondary and so
on, but if the second user puts in a new request before the first user, the
second users request will path to the Primary connection and vice versa.
This will depend on how your rules are configured and Listed, as you may
force users to take the OPT connection first and WAN second.
I am currently using Dual WAN in an Outgoing Load Balance as in the above
configuration, but I don’t have FailOver DNS working, so when one connection
is down all are down.
I have supplied many routers to customers and I have also hardware routers
but I find PFSense the best so far, that’s from a users perspective.
I hope that this has been helpful.
Kindest Regards,
Craig Roy
Horizon IT Consultants
Craig
Thanks for the confirmation. The kit we use is called a Firebrick
(www.firebrick.co.uk) and is a joint venture between our ISP and an
electronics company.
We use it configured to send outbound traffic down multiple Internet
connections on a round-robin fashion, packet by packet. This allows us
to get a true aggregated link. Our ISP does the same in the inbound
direction. Automated fallback if connections(s) fail is also handled and
the connection is removed from the pool.
This allows us to get at true 2Mb/s downstream, 0.5Mb/s upstream
connection to the Internet by agregating two 1+0.25Mb/s ADSL lines. Will
be interesting to see what happens next week when BT upgrade their
infrastructure to support the full capability of ADSL (8+0.8Mb/s).
Best Regards
David
