Hi Tuxies...

How do you do? Hope u are doing good and well..

I got a new Internet connection, a High-speed connection 8 Mbps (Hmm highest i can afford in India. LOL). I was previously using a 2 Mbps connection. Now if i connect these in a hub and then connect it my system..

Will i get 10 Mbps( 8 + 2 ) speeds/bandwidth?

or

Will i be restricted only to 2 Mbps..

I'm just a budding kid.. so i'm very sorry, if i had said something technically wrong..

Please ask questions if you are not clear.. ty..

Is there any other way to make it a 10 Mbps (I mean by 2+8) connection?

Hi welcome to LQ!

you may probably want to look here.

Thank you that helped.. But not the answer for my question i think....

You will get either 8 Mbps or 2 Mbps depending on which connection is used to setup your network. Presumably you get your IP from the connection via DHCP then the one replying and serving out gateway addresses will be the one that dictates the speed. If you use static IP addressing then you will have a gateway set in /etc/resolv.conf that will force one connection to be used.

You cannot just connect to two outgoing internet connections and expect them to both be used and "added together" in performance.

You need load balancing which may be done in a special router or on a linux box with two ethernet connections. Have a look here for tips on the Linux box option and google for "load balancing router". This example will give you some idea.

@anoopch

Glad to see it helped.

Well it is answered nicely by bgeddy.

As far as learning is concerned, check this idea too.

Happy learning !!

Yeah that made me to learn a lot.. thanks... never knew such a topic existed...

Is load balancing possible only in a specific hardware ie) router?

Can we make a software or configure a linux server to be a load-balancing server?


Can we configure Smooth Wall Express3 to be so?

Yup.. thnks for the readme... that too contributed in growing my brain's storage..

You can setup a Slackware box to perform load balancing. Have a loook at Neils Horn's blog here that mentions this. Neils himself often contributes here and may well chip in. Personally I have not setup load balancing but have cionfigured a Slackware box as a router using iptables to perfom Nat functionality and share an internet connection across my network using iptables. My brother has setup a load balancing router to up his bandwidth using an ADSL connection and a 3G usb dongle via the Vodaphone network. This was all serving a Windows network. He is limited to slow speeds over ADSL due to his location and wants to up his connection speeds. This worked but not as efficiently as he had hoped.

complexnat.png

This is the LAN layout i'm saying about.

I plan to use a Firewall like SmartWall Express 3.0.

Can you please explain a bit more on this..

1. Where does the firewall comes?

Between Netgear and Slacware server

Between Slackware server and Internet Hub

another suggestions?

That was wonderful.. Same as my Scenario..

Any firewall should protect the attached networks and so would come between the Slackware server and the internet hub. You may have the server set up to run the firewall as well as a file/other server although it would be best to isolate a machine for this purpose if possible.

To be honest I have never personally tried the mutli-Wan/ load balancing setup and my Brother's experience of this was rather disappointing in performance. I believe better gains may be seen when multiple PC's on a network share internet access across more than one Wan connection. That is not quite the same as one PC using more than one Wan connection to gain bandwidth.

You really need to research this yourself as my direct experience is limited. This site is good as are many others. The Networking Forum here on LQ may be a better place to get help as this is rather specialised. Don't forget search keywords like "dual Wan/ load balancing/ mutli ISP/ etc" will yield loads of useful results via Google.

Perhaps someone has direct experience of such a setup but, as mentioned, mine is "second hand" and somewhat limited. This is really quite a complex area of networking and routing and will teach you a lot. Good luck with this.

Hey thanks a lot for your help... Even though you say that you are not experienced, i learned a lot of stuff.. Certain info that i never knew existed....

I have not tried it with Slackware but along time ago tested it in Windows. I has it set up for a single machine and found it much slower for normal browsing and only saw improvement in torrents, it would also give problems with lots of sites as cookies would not carry across ip addresses which would cause all sorts of login problems.

I had a quick read of Neils Horn's blog and his setup would be your best bet, he saw the cashing of sites as a problem but this would solve some of the problems i experienced. Also i dont think you are going to get it working with just 1 network card buy a cheap pci network card and have them both set for dhcp, flow the instructions in Neils blog and then if you are happy work from there, if not write it off as a bad idea.

Noticed the interesting subject...

I still use that setup described on my blog, although with a different usb stick now.
Like I explained in the post, it works perfectly for downloading large files with bittorrent software, where you have several connections open at the same time.
But if you're the only user on the system and download a file from a single source, you will use only one of the links.

So..
I think it will surely benefit in a LAN Network, where multiple users request multiple connections right?

I think we can route a particular group of systems to use ISP1 and the other to use the ISP2.. I don't have knowledge in this type of routing.. any info on that?


My scenario is multiple windows clients on the LAN use VOIP s/w to communicate with. Hence require considerable bandwidth. We got 40 client Systems in LAN.. Of which 30 will always be working.. Do you think i will benefit, if i use load balancing?