Hi, Is there some utility to do a connection teaming in Linux? I want to team my two connections at home, a cable(ethernet) and a DSL into one big stable internet connection.. I have been searching the net for sometime and the closest thing I''ve seen so far is using linux ipchains software to access my connection via vicomsoft''s intergate in windows (thus teaming them together in windows).. but I want to do it from linux instead. Any ideas on how to do this? Thanks

Maybe you could ipchain both machines?

Interesting. There is a technology called NIC teaming, but that requires switches that support Link Aggregation or FEC (Fast Ethernet Channel).


From your link:


"NetWorld+Interop 2001 I found an interesting piece of software called MidPoint from MidCore Software. Midpoint has a feature called ?connection teaming?. Connection teaming aggregates multiple connections to the Internet for increased bandwidth. Along with connection teaming, the software splits large files being downloaded into multiple smaller parts and downloads each part at the same time along each connection. Wow! "

The main speed increase I would suspect is from the multiple requests of large files. This is a proven method for download increases, and is why some FTP programs and many of the P2P programs support multi-connection downloads. The bottleneck of your uplink gateway (router) would come far before any benefits of a second NIC were added.

Odds are this software does the same with web content, splitting requests over both NICs.

If this software doesn''t exist for Linux, then it won''t work. I haven''t seen one before that does something similar, though many programs download programs support multiconnection requests. I don''t use Mozilla much, so might be interesting to find out if it uses such a technique.

IPChains won''t help you here. I don''t buy his "pages spring to life" unless he was hitting pages with large content files. I do buy the download increase, but you can find other programs to do that. Bear in mind it was for "large multiple download files". It won''t work on a single file, though some of the P2P programs use multiple connections to grab section of a large file and merge it when complete.

I haven''t sen anything but commercial drivers that support nic teaming/NLB. They usually do this by creating a virtual device and managing all data across the NICs.

Interim

Hmmm...I believe that pf''s (packet filter) latest release supports load balancing between multiple connections; I could be mistaken. This might be able to do what you are looking for. Pf is a *BSD related prog, but I am sure you cna compile it on Linux as well. Check this out and see if it will fit the bill.

The Tyr project is here.

quote: Original post by xaxa
Maybe you could ipchain both machines?

can this really be done using ipchains alone? Right now I''m using ipchains (as a NAT) so that I can access my cable internet on linux using windows.. But how can ipchains be used to team connections?
There is also another problem; my DSL modem does not have Linux drivers so it only works in windows.. so I use something like this when I need to access my DSL connection from Linux (found it on the net somewhere once, route add default gw 192.168.0.2 eth0 )

quote: Original post by Interim
Interesting. There is a technology called NIC teaming, but that requires switches that support Link Aggregation or FEC (Fast Ethernet Channel).

I didn''t mention this earlier but the only reason why I''m looking forward to team connections on my Linux machine is because I want to run some sort of temporary hosting for my less active sites. So, even though I don''t have any remote intention to use it commercially but I still would want that I can utilize most of the bandwidth I''ve got. Also the other obvious reason is this way my either connection can serve as backup when one goes down..

quote: Original post by OctDev
Hmmm...I believe that pf''s (packet filter) latest release supports load balancing between multiple connections; I could be mistaken. This might be able to do what you are looking for. Pf is a *BSD related prog, but I am sure you cna compile it on Linux as well. Check this out and see if it will fit the bill.

Thanks for the link! The Traffic Redirection part looks interesting, but I guess it''ll take me a day or two before I can figure out how this whole thing works

quote: Original post by cyanide
can this really be done using ipchains alone? Right now I''m using ipchains (as a NAT) so that I can access my cable internet on linux using windows.. But how can ipchains be used to team connections?
There is also another problem; my DSL modem does not have Linux drivers so it only works in windows.. so I use something like this when I need to access my DSL connection from Linux (found it on the net somewhere once, route add default gw 192.168.0.2 eth0 )

So you have a Windows machine with DSL, another one with cablemodem and both computers connected in a LAN?

If that''s the case, you can make a internet connection sharing on the windows machine and setup the DHCP client on linux to use that gateway on the eth(LAN)(192.168.0.1 I guess you''re doing that).
Then if you have the eth(CABLEMODEM) already working then you''re already able to access internet, I guess you just have to find a way to route some paquets to one gateway and others to the another. I never did something like that, but I think that once you have both connections working is just a matter of figuring out how to use both gateways-