On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 14:24, Brad Davidson wrote:
> William L. Thomson Jr. said:
>
> > Yes, but not in sense that traffic comes in one interface and goes out
> > another. From my understanding the main benefit of the SysMaster
> > solution was the number of connections being balanced had nothing to do
> > with the number of interfaces.
>
> ... so it would go in and then come out again on the same interface?
>
> I'm sure it's great as far as ease of configuration, but to tell the truth
> I'd rather plug in an extra cable or two, and not halve my available
> bandwidth by doubling the per-link traffic.
>
> I guess it's a very targeted product, I just think it sounds rather silly.
I'm guessing it has two interfaces. Hence the sentence:
> > Yes, but not in sense that traffic comes in one interface and goes out
The one interface connects to the local lan. The other connects to a
network that can route to all of your upstream providers. This way the
load balancer doesn't charge you per physical interface. It's no harder
to load balance 2 way then 4 way, but a lot of network equipment makers
would charge you twice as much because there are twice as many
interfaces (or would charge you a significant amount more to have 4
interfaces).
I'm guessing this is a pretty smart option assuming the aggregate
traffic leaving you network is less then 100Mbit/s. If it's more then
100Mbit/s, you can afford better equipment. This does have some latency
and security issues, but would seem like a reasonable idea for a lot of
small networks that want to split out traffic down two providers. If I
was a window's admin, and didn't know enought about Linux, I'd think
that was one really cool piece of equipment... *grin*.
Thanks,
Kirby
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