Hacker News Reader

Comment by noonespecial | Hacker News Reader

Check out this simple way to do it with what's already on your linux box from before the turn of the century. <=(spooky conan music with flashlight)

http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.loadshare.html

6 15Mbit connections from the same cable provider isn't likely to be much faster for you than 2 or 3. They'll all be on the same segment.

Also, I don't know if its improved any in 7 but up until windows XP, the packet reordering this setup will generate makes connections slower than the slowest link. Unless you've got a non-windows os, this will make it worse.

View on HN

Yea I've never even tried this on windows, if I wanted to use windows with it I'd set it up on a linux box and route my windows machine through that in which case you wouldn't have the issue you described. EDIT: Ah I just realized what you meant about windows and packet reordering. It's actually not an issue with tunnel splitter because all packets will come in order. Tunnel splitter uses N standard TCP connections to tunnel through. The actual data will come to tunnel splitter out of order and it will deal with reconstructing the data, not the OS.

As for the 6 15Mbps connections those were just arbitrary numbers I picked. I'm currently stuck with sucky slower connections which is what I'm using it with. And DSL not cable. I'm not sure what you say about cable is true though since most cable modem speed cap is on the modem itself not at the ISP. At least that used to be the case. Also if you were using different ISPs that wouldn't be an issue, as long as they aren't sharing their network.

In terms of the pure linux routing solution, that is pretty interesting... Does it require that the remote machine has two physical interfaces or could you do the same with virtual interfaces like eth0:0 and eth0:1. Either way there are a few drawbacks with that solution. It will send 100% of your traffic through it rather than being able to selectively proxy. Also it only round robins so there is no intelligent load balancing as there is in tunnel splitter.

Ahh.. read the mighty and mysterious tome of lartc just a bit deeper and all will be revealed. The teql becomes an interface all its own and with the black arts of packet-mark-itsu, and route-fu all this and much more can be accomplished.

I actually tried to write a packet reordering buffer but one of my connections had a pretty big latency so added together, my rtt became huge. My solution was actually to use windows less, and route small interactive stuff like DNS on the low latency, but slow connection.

Oh and virtual interfaces and vlans will both do just fine. I only ever had one nic in my main box, my direcway modem and dialup-box were hooked to it via a little switch.

Yes, I load-balanced a satellite link and a phone modem.

cool, i'd be interested in hearing more on your setup, do you have your routing scripts up anywhere?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com