Craig Roy wrote:
I have 2 1.5/256 DSL connections configured as Round Robin, but only on my end as I mentioned earlier all ISP's here don’t support aggregating. My good fortunate on downloading that large file was most likely something to do with the server that I was getting it from, recognising both IP's.
We are lucky. Our ISP is Andrews and Arnold (http://www.aaisp.net.uk) who are cutting edge in respect to getting the very best out of xDSL in the UK.
They have been doing upstream and downstream bonding for a number of years now, but until recently it relied on having a Firebrick at both ends of the connection to get both the downstream and upstream bonded. The remote firebrick was hosted in a rack at their datacentre.
We had a single firebrick in our premises that provided upstream bonding and failover, downstream traffic was passed down only one ADSL line unless there was a failure and then it fell back to the second line. Due to the way that BT did their routing the fallback took 20 minutes which wasn't so good.
This has all changed now as AAISP have rolled out a new router at their end of the DSL connection and can now bond downstream without the second hosted firebrick. This also has the advantage of failover between lines in less than 10 seconds. The downstream bonding on it's own doesn't even need a firebrick at the customer end, just two ADSL routers and a switch between the routers and the firewall. Cool or what. This means it is theoretically possible for people to get a true 15 Mb/s internet connection (downlink) for £55 including the PSTN exchange line rental.
When I saw it happening, I could not believe my eyes. The first 170MB downloaded in 4 minutes. The remaining slowed off a bit. It takes a good server to upload at that speed and a good connection to maintain it.
Hmmm, I can remember doing a double-take at our m0n0wall firewall protecting our hosting servers. This has a 100Mb/s link to the internet in a datacentre. We run WSUS to keep all the servers properly patched (yes they are MS Windows 2003) and our m0n0wall was pushing 35-40 Mb/s at times during the intial patch download from Microsoft. We took all patches in about 20-30 minutes which at the time was about 1.5 GB.
The www.firebrick.co.uk is quite hard to look at, at this time of the day, being bright red! What are they thinking?
Dunno, I think they share colour distaste with Soekris. Where did Soekris get that vile green colour from?
Even odder is the setting to make all the leds on the front flash in sequence Knight Rider style. Have a look at http://www.makingithappen.co.uk/firebrick.htm. The official line is that this allows a single device in a rack to be easily identified if you want to do some maintenance. Having met the guy that developed the firebrick, I think this was an accidental benefit to something he programmed for a giggle.
Best regards David
