[extropy-chat] Multi Homing?

[steve]

On Sunday 11 February 2007 6:11 am, Brent Allsop wrote:
> Extropians,
>
> Do any of you guys "Multi Home" your home network internet connection?
>
> 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've been using a Twin Wan Router XC-DPG502 by Xincom for two years with a 
Qwest DLS line and radio network via http://www.digis.net/.  The Digits was 
the only type of broadband available when I got the house but a few months 
later DLS was added.  It has only been in the past few months that comcast 
cable service was turned on to my neighborhood (new house) and I plan to add 
that and drop the Digits service.

The DLS is a 1.5 m unmetered connection and digits is a 1.0 m metered 
connection.  My son did a lot of gaming so I had it set to broadband share 
80/20 to keep the Digits under 3 gigs of xfer per month.

The downside, some software applications fail on a dual wan router.  For 
example eSignal stock charting software crashes claiming that I'm trying to 
run two versions of the software.  The company has no fix.  The see requests 
coming from two IP address and assume you have two copies running.  There 
might be a way to always force an application to only use one route, but I 
haven't done the research to figure it out.  As a consequence, I've had to 
reconfigure my router to fallover mode with the DSL as primary and the Digits 
as the fallover if DSL goes down.  DSL fails or goes to a craw about every 
other month and I do a quick reconfigure to make Digis the primary for a day 
or two.

I also have had problems with DNS requests.  The router gives out a DNS 
address to all the computers on the system (DHCP) and requests comming from 
computers to the router cause an address translation to the right DNS 
depending on which of the two lines the data is being routed.  Sometimes this 
hangs and requires a reboot of the computers.  I ended up putting the qwest 
DNS address into the computers directly and this problem went away.  When 
quest dsl goes down, the DNS servers are unaccessible but the computers seem 
to go happily along somehow getting DNS service from the Digis.net servers.

When my children with portables come over and use the network a lot, 
eventually they run into this problem as well but I just have them reboot 
instead of trying to configure their computers specifically for my network 
bugs.

> I would also like to upgrade to gigabit in my home so I can transfer live
> video and stuff.

With connections only as fast as 1.5 M, I didn't see any advantages to gigabit 
yet on my home network.

> 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:
>
> http://www.netgear.com/Products/VPNandSSL/WiredVPNFirewallRouters/FVS124G.a
>s 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...
>
> 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
> run reliably without having the router crash all the time…?

I've administered Unix boxes before and I didn't want to deal with configuring 
linux for this.  In any case, I have a utility room where all the electronics 
in the house converge and where I did all the wiring for ethernet that goes 
to most of the rooms in the house.  To use a linux box, I would either have 
to have a dedicated box in the utility room or have enough cable runs to the 
office.

> Any ideas, tips, or personal success stories would be greatly appreciated?
>
> Thanks
>
> Brent Allsop

-- 

Steve - dudescholar2 at basicmail.net

"When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never 
tried before."
   --Mae West