[TriLUG] Dual-homed Internet?

[Paul Bennett]

Hi,

Any tips, tricks, suggestions, or gotchas regarding dual-homed setup?

At home, my wife and I currently run two DSL lines. For some time, I've  
been meaning to install a smart load-balancer to effectively share both  
lines between both our PCs. It's never been a priority because, well,  
DSL's DSL, and 2 * DSL / 2 == DSL.

However, because she works from home, we're going to be replacing one of  
the DSL lines with a T1, in order to get stability, guaranteed ping, and  
guaranteed uptime.

Therefore, setting up something clever has become a bigger priority. I  
want to get set up so that ping-sensitive traffic goes to the T1 line, and  
bandwidth-hungry traffic goes to the DSL line, among other things. Also,  
since we'll have several static external IPs, I'm thinking some 1:1 NAT  
would be good for our SIP devices and a web server.

I'm thinking a severerly-hardened Gentoo box running Shorewall, with  
Webmin, Nagios & MRTG, on a low-end Core2 Duo with 4GB of RAM and a 10Krpm  
hard drive and/or cheap SSD.

Anything I should know (especially about Shorewall) before I start RTFM?



Thanks,



-- 
Paul