Hi Guys,

I need to setup a proxy/firewall that has some built in traffic statistics and useful reporting. I am looking at IPcop, pfSense, Clear OS etc....

The catch is that I need to load balance between 4 ADSL lines on the same box(I have a NIC with 4 ports). Any suggestions how I should go about this? Ideally one of the above mentioned proxy/firewalls have a build in feature to load balance between 4 NICs.

Thanks
Darkmode

You can use bonding interface to load balance on 4 NIC. Most Linux distribution should support it.

I can't find the page I was looking for most the bsd's have had that feature for quite some time. Pretty sure one or more of the choices you have has a web site page devoted to it. (I think)

Just to be sure, you want load balancing or possibly fail over too?

Without knowing more, its hard to give a specific answer.

You can do a search of 'broadband bonding' to find out how others have approached the issue.

Thanks for the input guys.

Jefro: Not fail over, the current setup is 4 DSL lines that are load balanced with a tp-link load broadband load balancer. It doesn't work well,
I don't think the load balancing would be much of a problem. Probably 4 different route tables with equally weighted default routes should do the trick?

I am more curious about which proxy to use?
I'm considering just doing my own thing from scratch. Maybe squid with SARG? Is there anything else that provides nice reporting?

Thanks

Before i go into great detail about this,.. do you have a preference of what OS to use? If not, im going to explain in redhat(more people are likely to run into this article and be familiar with RH).. although in reality i would use OpenBSD.

That cool?

I'm fairly new to the linux world and am currently using debian.
I don't mind you explaining in any distro, as long as I get the logic I'l manage.

Appreciate your help

Following link can help you configure bonding interface on Debian. You can choice different mode for load balance.
http://linux-on-a-server.com/ethernet-nic-bonding/

Might as well look at untangle as a choice.


https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN_2.0

For an example on pfsense.


The choices you have are common ones that a person might consider.

As much as these are links to four different ISPs, your solution needs to ensure all packets from a connection go through the same link, else endless firewall problems will follow. This should be handled OK by bonding interfaces in balance-xor mode. Protocols which dynamically generate connections, like FTP and H.323 will likely break however in any scenario involving more advanced firewall inspection in the packet path.

It is probnably worth noting that even if you administer the remote end of all required connections, as would be the case with a mesh of remote offices and no access to the Internet outside, loadbalancing 4x 1Gbps interfaces will not give you 4Gbps speed - it will only allow more users to connect at 1Gbps without overloading the link.