hello all! I live out in the sticks where there is no hope of ADSL or cable.. the choices I have are satellite (which is rather costly), or dialup.

At the moment, the house has 2 Windows computers in it both doing the dialup thing on their own. I can have 2 connections to the ISP, but it will not allow me to dial in with my 2 modems and start PPP MultiLinking. from what I understand I need a load balancer or modem bonder or somthing of the like.

what I would like to do is set up a proxy / firewall / load balancer on a spare computer and use my 2 56K modems for the connections.. have the windoze computers connect to it over a 10Mbps lan, have it dial out, and allow me to use windows in a regular manner..

the software that we use is your regular outlook express and internet explorer, plus your other goodies such as kazaa or winMX..

does anyone have any suigjestions?

oh yeah.. shoot.. my modems are connexant hard and soft modems.. I can remember I had no problem with the hardmodem, but the softmodem gave me troubles last time I was running linux on this comp..

as for the distros, I have some older redhat ones (6.2, 7.1) and mandrake 8.1 I believe.. I have some really old slackware and open linux I think and suse.. but I couldnt for the life of me get them to install for some reason..

thankyou for any help,

nate.

unfortunately the only solutions i know are multilink or eql. I saw people reporting some solution on www.netfilter.org. I had a quick look and did not see anything but you may be luckier than me.

what exactally is eql? I have read about software for windows that you can buy (ofcourse) like intergate or the like. it senses what interface has the most bandwith free, and then sends the packets to it. that way the modems are sharing the load..

isnt there some way to do that in Linux?

nate.

even better.. does anyone know commands that would give you the bandwith usage for a specified adapter and a way to switch default connections?

it wouldnt be hard to write some software to have it compare the bandwith and switch the default connection to the modem that isnt being used as much.. have it cycle fairly fast (IE maby 10 or 20 times a second..) and away we go! I just dont really know the commands :S

thankyou for your help
nate.

you could use some features of netfilter to change the route based on other criteria, but the issue is that you'll have a separate ip address per modem connection if your ISP do not want to use multilink. So you must use the same IP for a complete TCP ou UDP "session" otherwise your connections will be dropped by the other end. So you could imagine using the 2 links for specific traffics depending on the source or the protocol, etc.
there is a channel bonding driver in linux which may be useful as well, but i dont know the way it works compared to multilink and I guess you need to establish the same configuration on the isp side ... hope this helps

k.. whell here is how midpoint or the like works..

when the webpage is being loaded, it sends out many many requests for code. it takes these whole requests, and sends them out over the 2 different IPs. the server then sends it back to the IP it came from, and your comp puts it back togeather..

another example.. KaZaA makes 4 connections to the outside world.. lets say for simplicities sake they were all equal in bandwidth.. so it would use modem 1 for the first 2 segments, then it would use modem 2 for the second 2 segments. voila! double the bandwith!

it is kinda the same idea as MultiLink, but multilink splits the packets, whereas this devides the packets..

I dont know.. I might have to use wintendo to do this and find some cheap software and save up my lunch money.. damn this college thing is hard on the wallet!

oh whell.. so I would only be able to split the connections via the different ports? that might work a little better.. but still not what I was looking for..

thankyou for your help..
nate

such way to split the load seems fine. to be honest i've not been able to spend too much time on this kind of issue, i only know a bit of netfilter

never thought of ISDN ? it should not be a technical challenge for your isp ...

Hope this helps