[extropy-chat] Multi Homing?

Sun Feb 11 13:59:20 UTC 2007

On Sun, Feb 11, 2007 at 06:11:20AM -0700, Brent Allsop wrote:

> Do any of you guys "Multi Home" your home network internet connection?

Not yet, but others do. I might at some point, if prices come down.
Right now I'm planning to buy 20/50 MBit FTC once it's de-bundled
from telephony and TVoIP.

> I currently have Comcast cable as my primary connection, but would like to
> include a Quest DSL modem redundant connection to increase reliability and
> bandwidth. (Comcast has been down for a week or so twice last year.)
> 
> I would also like to upgrade to gigabit in my home so I can transfer live
> video and stuff.

Done that a few years ago. When you do, make sure your switch and your
NICs both can do jumbo frames (most recent switches do, but I would
check to make sure), and configure them. You probably want a switch
without a fan, too.

> One possibility I see is getting a “dual wan” capable router that does “load
> balancing”.  There seems to be lots of these out there, but the only one
> that supports gigabit on the LAN side seems to be NetGear's FVS124G:

I would stay away from Netgear routers. Switches can be fine, I run many of those.

You don't actually need the router to be able to handle GBit speeds, 
unless you want to connect your home with >100 MBit line. Just
connect your router to the GBit switch, which will autoconfigure the
ports to 10/100/1000 according to their capabilities.

> http://www.netgear.com/Products/VPNandSSL/WiredVPNFirewallRouters/FVS124G.as
> px
> 
> But from the reviews this sounds like it might be a very unreliable box?
> 
> Some other friends of mine are saying I should just configure my Linux box
> to have several NIC cards and have it handle the WAN connections and NAT
> services...

I've made very good experiences with a WRAP box running pfSense.
I wouldn't recommend using a PC for that purpose, because a 150 W device
will set you back some $150/year for electricity alone, if ran 24/7/365.

I would just pick up a multiple-NIC embedded capable of runing
http://pfsense.org/ (m0n0wall is also ok, but you won't get multihomed/failover
with that yet), and follow the documentation. You might want to look into
VIA EPIA C7 boards, some of which have multi-NIC expansion boards with GBit
(but with crappy Realteks).  It *will* be hairy.
You might or might not need a Level 2 switch which can define VLANs.

> Are these the only two possibilities?  Which of these would be the best for
> someone that is not a professional network administrator?  And which would

If you're not a professional network administrator yet, you might want
to hire one, or to become one by the time you're done. Just a fair warning.

> run reliably without having the router crash all the time…?
> 
> Any ideas, tips, or personal success stories would be greatly appreciated?

Here's one:

From: Michael Vrettos <mvrettos at net-landia.net>
To: support at pfsense.com

Hi there,

We've have a pfsense setup with vlans to engage 6 adsl lines + lan + wifi to
a 3 nics Server (2 x 10/100 + 1 Gbit)

To accomplish a similar setup you need a vlan capable switch. We did that
with a netgear smart switch
http://www.netgear.com/Products/Switches/SmartSwitches/FS726T.aspx

Once you become familiar with your vlan switch you must setup your desired
vlans.

In our case we only using the switch to connect our adsl lines with 1 of the
server nics (10/100). We connect the other 10/100 nic with a wifi AP and the
remaining gigabit nic with our LAN switches.

We don't use the 10/100 nic directly in pfsense.. we rather created vlans
based on that nic.. vlan1 to vlan6; vlan1 --> wan, vlan2 --> opt1, ..vlan6
--> opt5 (we renamed opt1 to wan2, etc.).
IMPORTANT: USE SAME VLAN NAMES in your switch!.. meaning that if you create
"vlan1" in pfsense then you need to do the same in the switch (switch
"vlan1").

Our netgear setup was straight forward.. we dedicated switch ports 1-6 to
the adsl modem/routers and port 24 for the pfsense nic, creating vlan1 =
switch port1 --> switch port24, ... vlan6 = switch port6 --> switch port24.

Then we connected adsl modem1 to switch port1 and so on.
Every modem has a lan side ip of type 192.168.x0.1/255.255.255.0

So modem 1 has ip 192.168.20.1 and vlan1 interface in pfsense (dedicated to
wan) has ip 192.168.20.10 with GW 192.168.20.1 (adsl modem's ip).. modem 2
has ip 192.168.30.1 and vlan2 interface in pfsense (dedicated to opt1) has
ip 192.168.30.10 with GW 192.168.30.1 (adsl modem's 2 ip)..and so on.

After that you need to setup pfsense for load balancing if you like and/or
port forwarding + some other things..(ftp helper, squid, etc.).

In any case, you are right about lack of detailed howtos!!

Regards

Michael Vrettos
Email - mvrettos at net-landia.net
Spain - +34 626544403
Hellas - +30 6978557240
My status
Get Skype and call me for free.

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Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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