Advice on Load Balancing and Failover Routers

Well I think im going to try this product. I assume openBSD is a command line type interface? I dont have too much linux knowledge would I find trying this product impossible? I do LOVE cisco CLI, hp, whatever.....

I have an old AMD mb 800mhz stick 3 nic cards in it and see what happens.

Are there any Rack mount PC casses that will fit in a Wireing Rack(not the wider server racks)?

You'll have to familiarize with UNIX concepts like the permission system and the command shell in order to have proper control, but if you spent some time you'll definitelly make it. OpenBSD's manual pages are generally considered the best among all unix-like OS and the official FAQ is also very thorough. Try it out and if you have any problem we can discuss it at the unix forum

As for the casses I'm afraid I have no idea, but since there are implementations occupying even less space than regular routers (like soekris) it is possible that something exists.

Hi dudes.

as Chris Says coenceptually load balance, and ciscos implementation "policy based routing" is quite misunderstood, both are different concepts

What I was trying to explain in the last post is about you can do a sort of "load balance" when you implement policy based routing, but as all fo you know, by the impredescible tcpip nature and behavior, there is a great risk, that you overutilize one link over another.

one key feature where you really implement load balancing will be doing it at layer 2, by ppp multilink bundles at serial lines, or etherchannel at ethernet connections.

of course both sides of the link must be correctly setup for ppp multilink to work, so the sending side, must fragment each packet, and send pieces of the fragment packet in the interfaces memeber of the channel bundle.

so you are using dsl lines, who work with atm encapsulation at layer 2, so you can implement, PPPoATM with PPP MULTILINK to form in the LCP negotiation process.


another way you can do load balance, is at layer 3, at the egress interface side, by per packet load balancing, or per destination load balancing, of course if you setup it in only one side, you only load balance all exiting traffic leaving the router towards the destination, so for proper per packet or per destination both sides of the wan link must agree with configs.
of course it works with dynamic routing enabled, and depends alot in the dynamic rouing protocol feature to support equal or unequal load balancing.

The Edimax is about $1100.00US - nice price!! And they responed immediately to my inquiry.

well, gentlemen I can say i've been enlightened. I'm glad you lot stepped in before some of us got confused.

Its gr8 to read from the veterans as your in depth knowledge and experience is quiet vast. Now all we have to do is go out there read more and make our own conclusions.

I just love this site.

Bravo!

I have found a very reasonably priced router that offers both failover, failback and load balancing. It is the MBR1000 from a company called CradlePoint. www.cradlepoint.com
They have several offerings.
CPTG