carrying traffic from multiple but seperate T1's

[lanebob]

I am just trying to determine a course of action in terms of the need for more bandwidth. My options are to purcahse a router that can bond two seperate T1's for contiguous bandwidth, or to more simply just have seperate routes over the wireless network to accomodate users from each T1, but not have the redundancy that the former method would achieve. Is this a simple thing, or would bonding them at the core router be a better option?

Thanks,

-lanebob

[rsimhamb]

Hey LaneBob,

You can use Linux to load balance traffic with redundancy between two or more internet connections. This is done using the ip V2 tools. The balancing/sharing is for outgoing traffic only. I have done this and it works very well.

see this link:

http://www.samag.com/documents/s=1824/sam0201h/0201h.htm

It's a good start.

Cheers,

Ravi

[sploit]

Just buy a fractional ds3

That way you can scale your banwidth as you need it.

Does your router not provide that support? - If so try getting a higher end router.

[Elshar]

If your using higher-end gear, you could use mlppp to virtually bond both/all the t1's together. That, or multiple equal-weight, equal-cost routes will "load-balance", but your not going to see anything near a 3 meg circuit on any one transfer (Although the total aggregate in/out traffic will).

Really, I'd go with sploit's suggestion of getting a fractional DS3, and turning up bandwidth as you need it. The initial expense is a tad more, but it'll save alot of headaches in the long run. Not to mention you'll actually get to see about a 384KB/s transfer over it, rather than two 192KB/s transfers.

[sploit]

This may be more of a reality than a theory, but if you have an Auto Sensing Switch, you should be able to put an uplink connection from both t-1's (Patch cables) into the auto sensing router.

Then, run your main ETH1 connection into that same switch, and you should be able to use use 1 IP address from each t-1 as the gateway for your clients on the same NIC

If each t-1 has a different WAN gateway, then you should be able to specify that in Station Router's gateway setup.

I am still working on documenting station router common setups for people.
I am fairly new to Station Router, but it is simple to understand after using it for an hour.

Good product, but needs support for TI chipsets (Although it's not their fault, Texas Instruments won't release the Chip Programming Codes to them... Bastards).

Hopefully TI chipsets will be supported soon, as they are more commonly found in stores than Lucent based chipsets.

Also, Lonnie. If you could put up a section of the main website that contains cards that are supports (And not just chipsets) that would be cool.
And have a card submission of your site, that if people have found wireless cards that work with staros that are lucent or prism based they can email you the results, and you can put it on the list.

Links of where to buy the cards, or selling them off your site would be a good idea.

[lonnie]

We are still smarting from the shot we took in recommending the Siemens PCI cards. Turns out they are the same as the LinkSys WMP-11 that had earlier suprised us. They changed from Intersil prism2.5 to Broadcom and we only support prism2.5 PCI. I'm sure a few guys got stung, so we will have to be very careful in future.