On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, you wrote:
> As most of you guys know, I have a small stake in an Internet Cafe along
> Katipunan road, and use Linux for our firewall, domain control, usage
> timing, and most transaction accounting (PostGres+Perl system).
> Unfortunately, it seems that running our 7-station cafe off a single
> 56Kbps modem is leading to serious bandwidth drought. Already, when four
> or more people try to surf the web at any one time, performance drops to
> an unacceptably slow level. I've been thinking of a number of ways to
> improve our system:
>
> 1. Cable Internet. Has anyone tried using locally-available cable
> systems on Linux? My rumbles off the Howto's and talks with my friends
> who do have such systems indicate that this will probably be possible.
> No Destiny in our area; apparently won't have Zpdee until later this
> year. Hopefully neither of these companies will be Windows bigots
> (seems more true of Zpdee than Destiny; at least they have an entry in
> their FAQ for nonstandard OS's!). Have no idea what their policy is
> regarding multi-homed hosts which act as router-firewalls either. Does
> anyone have authoritative information?
You can use either Destiny or ZpDee. ZPDee has traffic metering, so you when
you exceed a certain amount of data in and out of your cablemodem, you need to
pay an extra charge. I do not currently know if they charge extra per
connected PC.
Destiny has a flat rate, and they offer 2 kinds of service. commercial and
residential. Commercial is about 17-35K depending on bandwidth you with to get.
Residential is 1.8K depending again on how many PCs you connect to the cable
modem.
As for using these services for Linux, there's no problem with that. You
don't need an FAQ or howto to support that. Just use the DHCP client for Linux
to connect to ZpDee, or the residential service of Destiny, or for the
commercial service of Destiny, they give you a fixed IP.
>
> 2. Serial-line load balancing. Two modems, two phone lines, double the
> bandwidth. However the kernel driver hasn't been updated in a while and
> am not sure if this would work with just any ISP.
It will work for ISPs that have livingston portmasters. I've used it before
and it's really great. You do have to talk with your ISP about it first, as i
doubt that they will allow duplicate logins from the same user.
> 3. Multiple default routes. Not as good as load balancing, but also
> involves two modems and two phone lines. Not even sure if it's possible
> to formulate firewall rules to make half of our hosts get their packets
> forwarded through ppp0 and the other half through ppp1...
You can do this using equal cost multipath, but this will really be a pain if
one or two links keep on dropping. This is also connection level load
balancing, not transport level as in EQL. It is possible to have routing rules
in such a way that 50% of the connections goes through one link, and the
other 50% goes through the other, but again, this load balancing is connection
oriented, and it doesn't do much if the connection made on link 1 contains more
payload than the other.
> Any other suggestions? Our bandwidth price ceiling is about PhP
> 6000/month. Any suggestions which cost significantly more than this are
> useless. Thanks a lot!
I'd say get a little of both: a 56K dialup and a cablemodem service (if its
available), or get 56k dialup from different vendors and try ECM to load
balance the two.
Note that with cablemodem service, downtimes are more frequent than leased
lines. This is because the infrastructure is like a "bus" architecture, in
such a way that if there's a problem with your particular node, it brings the
service down, or slows it to a crawl. This is not good for business, and it
usually takes some time before the situation can be resolved. Hence, you need
an alternate service source. I'm not saying that the current cable providers
have a slow service response time.. i'm just saying that it's the reality of the
technology and situation that you have to live with.
HTH.
Ian
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