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?
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.
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...
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!
--
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| Rafael R. Sevilla [EMAIL PROTECTED] |
| Instrumentation, Robotics, and Control Laboratory |
| College of Engineering, University of the Philippines, Diliman |
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