Okay, so, I want to set a Linux box as a router for two Internet connections. I want Linux to be able to have to two connections as a redundant connection so that if one connection goes down it will use the other.

I want to have these two connections routing through the Linux box out to a wireless switch.

I want to know how to set this up? I am unsure but it doesn't sound too hard.

I am assuming I will need 3 NIC's (2 for external routing and one for internal routing)

I am unsure how extensive this is going to be so I am turning to the community for advice/help/guidance with this project.

one more thing: I am using openSUSE and I would like to use it for this as it is what I know best.

so... what do I do? what packages will I need? what configuration files will I need to modify? can I do this in YaST? If SUSE isn't right for the job then what is? is there specific NIC's I will need?

PLEASE HELP!

Thanks

Hello,

Have a look at the following links, the might be helpful:
Load Balance Failover MultiWAN
Linux Failover Router

Hope it helps.

Kind regards,

Eric

I don't know where a SUSE guide is, but this Gentoo guide might help if you can translate the Gentoo installation commands into SUSE commands:

http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/home-router-howto.xml

I have set up a triple-interface home router with DHCP, NAT, firewall, etc., though I've never tried to set up redundancy.

Is there a reason you want to set it all up manually? Why not use a distro designed for this purpose?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._distributions

One issue with using OpenSUSE is that support doesn't last a massive amount of time. When there is no support, you get no more bug fixes.

This isn't a problem if you are prepared to rebuild with a more up-to-date version, when support runs out. If you don't like this idea, you might be better off with something for which the availability of bug fixes lasts for a longer period (Debian, a Ubuntu LTS, SLES, Centos...).

The default assumption seems to have been that you mean a conventional, probably x86, computer, and not something like a box intended as a router with a specialist router distro such as DD-WRT, Tomato, etc. Is a conventional PC what you had in mind?

well I figure once I have it working i don't care about updates or anything like that so long as it just continues to keep working. If there are bugs that I keep running into with doing this then I will care to get them fixed but other than that I don't care.

Well really as I imagine it... it will be easiest to use just a regular old computer that we have sitting about to get this job done. I don't really want to set this up on some router and flash the router with a distro designed for that. However, with that said, I am not completely against that idea... provided I already have the hardware that I can use with that.