[TriLUG] Dual-homed Internet?

[Neil L. Little]

Most Telcos offer the faster ADSL2 (bridged DSL) that is good for 6mb 
down. T1's will give you synchronous throughput (same speed down/up) but 
it is not going to be much better than DSL lite. They also cost a pretty 
penny ($1k/month last I checked) as they require hardened pairs.

PfSense as a project hasnt seen a whole lot of activity of late and Im 
wondering if its becoming orphaned.

I have found another firewall called Untangled. Its based on 
Debian/Ubuntu. You might consider this.
I put together boxen using one of those micro atx (intel) mobos using an 
Atom processor that will sit quitely in the corner and not complain 
much. It cost just a bit over $200.

73,
Neil Little, WA4AZL


Paul Bennett wrote:
> 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,
>
>
>