Two Gateways, Can I Used Both Together?

[Crossy]

OK. In their infinite wisdom the office here is Bangalore decided that they could improve the internet connection by adding a second ADSL line.

We therefore have two gateways, 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.2.1 half the PC are on 192.168.2.xxx and the others 192.168.1.xxx there is no load balancer

With my subnet mask set to 255.255.252.0 I can see and use either gateway simply by changing the default gateway in Windows

What I'd REALLY like to do is use both together. Early in the morning before the locals arrive there is a total of 4Mbps of which I can only get half

Any configuration tricks to allow Vista to make use of all this available pipe??

[mdechgan]

Nah I tried it you can't use multiple gateways.

You can only have a primary and secondary or use 1 gateway for internet and 1 for vpn connections. You can't use two gateways for internet at the same time.

You will need a load balancer or dual wan router.

I can't seem to find anyone that sells them in Thailand.

If anyone know where I can get one please let me know.

I would use it but if its 10k baht I don't think its worth it.

[webfact]

Nah I tried it you can't use multiple gateways.

You can only have a primary and secondary or use 1 gateway for internet and 1 for vpn connections. You can't use two gateways for internet at the same time.

You will need a load balancer or dual wan router.

I can't seem to find anyone that sells them in Thailand.

If anyone know where I can get one please let me know.

I would use it but if its 10k baht I don't think its worth it.

Agree dual wan router is needed

- LAN is 192.168.3.x

- WAN1 is 192.168.1.x

- WAN2 is 192.168.2.x

I saw a few on ebay recently but can't remember when and brand name

[Crossy]

You will need a load balancer or dual wan router.

I can't seem to find anyone that sells them in Thailand.

If anyone know where I can get one please let me know.

I would use it but if its 10k baht I don't think its worth it.

I've been using Zeroshell http://www.zeroshell.net/eng/ at home, it does load balancing and failover (although I've not actually used these functions) runs on an old PIII 800 from Zeer (<$100).

Sadly the IT department here won't let me put one in so I need a windows solution to run on my workstation.

[sjaak327]

There is a windows solution for failover, (even though with the testing I did, it's not working properly), not for loadbalancing. The solution to this is indeed using a proper load balancing router. The Draytek routers are great for this purpose, but as stated by you, that doesn't help you.

However there might be applications (beyond the standard windows applications) that might do the trick on the client side for you, not sure if they exist, but google it in any case.

[niller74]

http://www.nixtech.net

Denmark and Thailand

[george]

Peplink is another good failover/load balance router:

http://www.peplink.com/balance/

I use the Peplink 30 model.

[mdechgan]

Anyone know how much it would cost in Bangkok?

dual wan load balancers.

[Crushdepth]

You will need a load balancer or dual wan router. I can't seem to find anyone that sells them in Thailand.

There are several different models recently came on the market in Bangkok. Quite easy to find in Fortune Plaza, I think D-link and Linksys, prices somewhere around 4,000-6,000 baht. Dual WAN ports, some have built in VPN server as well.

[stumonster]

the cheap way if you are prepared to config would be a 54GL with openwrt

http://forum.openwrt.org/search.php?search_id=153794618

[monty]

Easy to do with a load balancing router.

Not sure they are easy to find in Bangalore, however, for mdechgan, they are readily available in Thailand.

On shop4thai the D-link is 5,000 Baht, but usually in the regular shops they are a fair bit cheaper!

http://www.shop4thai.com/en/category/Netwo...esc&cat=135

For crossy, if you have an old cheap PC lying around somewhere (Pentium 500 Mhz upwards) with a cd drive and 3 network cards, you can make your own, using freeware called PFsense.

If you're a bit IT minded it's not that hard to get set up, there is lots of on-line help, fora and tutorials available. In Thailand if you'd have to buy the stuff, it would be less then 2,500 Baht!

[Crossy]

For crossy, if you have an old cheap PC lying around somewhere (Pentium 500 Mhz upwards) with a cd drive and 3 network cards, you can make your own, using freeware called PFsense.

If you're a bit IT minded it's not that hard to get set up, there is lots of on-line help, fora and tutorials available. In Thailand if you'd have to buy the stuff, it would be less then 2,500 Baht!

Problem is, as previously noted, the IT department won't install anything like a load balancer (readily here available BTW) as they don't deem it necessary. When we lose a line they go around reconfiguring all the machines that were on that subnet

So I was looking for a self-contained fix for my (underpowered anyway) workstation.

[foxxx]

might be better to just direct the traffic to a different connection / gateway with something like a snapgear router.

all ftp, voip, emails, torrents etc on one connection, http on the other.

[DTiger]

might be better to just direct the traffic to a different connection / gateway with something like a snapgear router.

all ftp, voip, emails, torrents etc on one connection, http on the other.

I am trying to solve the same kind of trouble by using ForceBindIP

• ADSL provider great for everything except http
  

• and a in-building wireless good only for surfing
  

If someone ever succeeded to make it work, I'd be pleased to hear how

[tariq786]

Yes u can use Multiple gateways.

The trick is to install Virtual Server on your machine then create a new VM and install Zeroshell or whatever supporting multi lan.

You should install min 3 virtual network cards in VM 1 for LAN and 2 for WAN i.e. the two network Gateways .

Then change your gateway to point LAN side of VM (Zeroshell).

I am using VMWARE and lots of different firewalls in a testing enviroment. But for Vista MS Virtual Server will be a better choice.

Tariq

[joncl]

Why not just install a Linksys RV042 for the purpose? I can confirm through first hand use they work better than quoted.

[monty]

Hi Crossy,

Don't know software which would do it seamlessly (fail over), but you can use a program called netsetman (google).

With this program you can set different sets of network setting and switch between by just a mouse click on the tray icon.

At least you won't have to go into the network settings every time...

[niller74]

There is no way to seamlessly 'carry' a connection from one interface to the other, unless both connections already run in a 'fail over state', which means you wont benefit from the additional bandwidth. When a connection drops each connection has to be re initiated on the fail over interface.

[JaiGuru]

Dual LAN routners aren't hard to find on the 2nd and 3rd floors at Zeer. Going price is around 5,500 THB, but don't recall manufacturers.

[Cuban]

As you are willing to experiment but are not able to get your mitts into the IT department's infrastructure (yes using a router to split the load is the correct solution) we have discussed the wonders of Bangalore technology before I recall, if you are able to get a second LAN connection and fit a second NIC in your computer, you could do the load split - rather than 'balance' locally on your PC.

I'm thinking of routing particular requests to one LAN's internet router and others to the second.

Are you using enough bandwidth to make this worthwhile? (I'm thinking running a torrent host maybe?)

Is there high traffic you are passing to/from particular sites?

The problem you will encounter without some control from a network router or direction from your PC is that the request/reply goes down different ISP connections - the packet sent by one and responded to by the other will be lost at the CPE router as it is not an established response. The effect is slow or lost pages or broken FTP sessions. I've encountered a similar situation where there was a dual connection in existance at different sites within the same domain without load balancing being possible between those routers, my solution was to divide the traffic on each router with a cost-path to allow resilience in the event of comms failure but not allow asymetrical paths to appear.

HTH

Edited March 5, 2009 by Cuban

[surface]

I have to agree with Tariq, and his suggestion is free as well. VMware server and the Linux software/appliances are free, so have a go.

[Prasert]

I can hardly believe that a setup like this is actually used in an office. It shows the (lack of) knowledge level of the IT guys maintaining it.

There is always only one default gateway (basic TCP/IP knowledge!).

Any traffic not matching any entry in the routing table is sent to the default gateway. Usually, a computer will only know it's own network and the gateway on that same network. This can be configured automatically by using dhcp, which makes centralized management possible.

Instead, these IT guys choose to manually update addresses on workstations

The easiest fail-over setup would be to use the router for what is does best: routing! The default route on the router is set by the ISP once the adsl line comes up (like dhcp, on ppp links ipcp is used). This default route will have a metric of 10 usually, depends on the router manufacturer.

For fail-over, one adds a routing entry in the routing table pointing a default route to the 2nd adsl router, but with a higher metric, e.g. 50.

If the adsl line on the router is up, it will have 2 default routes;

one is pointing to the ISP with a metric of 10

one is pointing to router2 with a metric of 50

The lowest metric will be used, so all traffic is sent out over the adsl line.

If the line goes down, the first default entry is removed and all traffic is then forwarded to router 2, which in turn sends it out over the 2nd adsl line.

When the first adsl line comes back up, a new default route is added to the table of router1 with a metric of 10 and the traffic is then sent out again over the first line.

Load balancing traffic over both lines could be done by distributing the session load over both connections.

The device responsible for the load balancing has to be aware of many protocol behaviours, for example:

FTP - consists of a control session and a seperate data session. If the data session is sent out over the other line, ftp will simply not work.

MSN - simple chat sessions will work, but when you start a file transfer or voice/video call, an additional session is created which has to use the same adsl line as the main msn session.

RTSP - Many websites use embedded video streams. The streams are mostly using the Real Time Streaming Protocol, running on port 552 and often use a session on port 1693 to control the stream.

The SOHO load balancers available on the market somehow don't mention any of this....

[niller74]

^^ Which is why most SOHO routers rely on 'sticky' connections for those protocols.