[extropy-chat] Multi Homing?

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Feb 14, 2007 at 10:29:56AM -0800, Sean Lynch wrote:

> Personally, I think multihoming a residential network is a waste of time
> and money, unless you have a "free" wireless network available to use as
> your backup. IMHO you'd be much better off simply switching to a more

It is difficult to see how one would run mission-critical things
on residential broadband -- bandwidth at the periphery is both
slow, expensive and unreliable. For many things a combination
of a (rented) colo (v)server, controlled from residential broadband
is best. I can't really beat the 7-fold redundancy of my hoster,
with a direct 2 GBit line to DE-CIX.

> reliable ISP. It sounds like your cable infrastructure may be old; my
> Comcast connection hasn't gone down even once in the almost two years
> I've had it, but San Jose recently went from having the oldest cable
> infrastructure in the SF bay area to the newest.
> 
> If you do choose to go with multi-homing, a Linux box is about the most
> flexible router you can go with. You want to load balance by sending

Linux is good, but it is not particularly well-architected. PF and CARP
(backported from OpenBSD) are much preferrable. Both http://m0n0.ch/wall/
and http://www.pfsense.com/ (pf standing here either for packet filter, or plain
fucking sense, according to the developers ;) run rings around a Netscreen
for an order of magnitude lower price (the software is free/libre, you just have
to pay for the hardware). Many of the features you simply won't find
elsewhere, period.

> different connections via different paths rather than by round-robining
> packets, though. In such a setup, your downtime will more likely be
> caused by the complexity of the network than by ISP issues, though.
> Also, you need to be able to actually monitor both links independently,
> say by putting a static route for a particular pair of IPs that you can
> ping via each provider and pinging each address periodically.

There's no need to do any of this manually. pfSense does multihoming
and failover with no problems.
 
> My own plan is to have Comcast for my primary connection and use a
> wireless network I'm helping build for backup. But my servers still live
> on a T1 line in industrial space in Santa Clara.

With things like DRAC 5 and IPMI 2.0 in general integrated there is
no need to ever know your servers intimately, when things fail (hopefully
slowly, since there is redundancy) remote hands installing mailed in
parts are much cheaper and easier than travelling to the location
physically.

With Amazon's S3 and EC2 computation completely becomes scalable,
transparent commodity (I still roll my own, because it's cheaper).

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