Here is a real challenge for the experts.
I have read the manual but never seem to find exactly what I am looking for. I have 4 data lines and would like to make them all work together as 1. They are all with differnet providers. (3x leased line, 1 x 1 way satellite down+vpn up)
I also need them to back one another up so if one fails the others take over seamlessly. Is there anyone that can tell me how to do it without using a standalone load balancer ?
FORGET IT. Nobody is able to help you with this, people here are lacking experience.
YOU WILL NEVER PROPERLY LOAD-BALANCE SUCH A DIFFERENT LINKS (LATENCY + BANDWIDTH + PROVIDERS). YOU WILL ALWAYS HAVE PROBLEMS WITH DISCONNECTED SESSIONS, BROKEN DOWNLOADS, IRC/ICQ NOT WORKING PROPERLY, NOT TO MENTION PEER-TO-PEER AND OTHER PROTOCOLS ETC.
Advice : invest your time in finding customers that will pay one single normal connection.
You are correct, inbound load balancing is a juggling act. If you can run BGP and work from a single set of IPs across providers it does help alleviate a lot.
Working with many subnets across many providers gets sticky. If you can deal with the little nuances that come with it you can get it working using DNS to loadbalance incoming traffic using round robin dns and policy routing to deliver it back out. You must mark the connections as they come in and be sure to send them back out the same pipe and ip address so you don’t break the ip connection.
Put it this way, there is not 1 clear answer for everyone to load balance across providers. You typically make your own solution and know it well enough to fix problems when they occur. Depending on your setup you might get something workable. Our inbound ddns load balancing script on Mikrotik might help you - we’d be happy to get more beta testers.
Sam
One last note - we are using Mikrotik with bgp to inbound and outbound load balance across Level3 and Cogent and it works perfectly. So yes it is possible it just depends on what you have to work with.
Sam
All of the incoming lines have cisco routers on them. The sat router/modem is a linkstar (yes I know, sis!) Each router can be set to have a consecutive ip, eg 192.168.0.1, 192.168.0.2 etc etc. I dont know if this info helps at all. I read up a bit about VRRP but dont want to experiment on a live network. It happened again today that the main line dropped and we had to manually swop the routers, naturally I had people all over my back about being down for a whole 5 minutes and 10 seconds.
Please advise.
So is your main goal to provide redundant outbound traffic only, or also redundant inbound for services like http and smtp ? VRRP provides redundancy for a gateway router but does not do load balancing.
Sam
Hello, I am doing load balancing with four wan ports and using MT!!! If you like info please email me at jdcallejas@hotmail.com.
Hi Dannyboy!
Can you please explain the basics of your current load balancing setup? It might help everyone reading this thread before they email you.
Thx!
Hi Thanks for the responses so far. Sam to answert your question, yes I am trying to create redundency on my network for incoming and outgoing traffic. I saw VRRP only does fail over but apparently if you use VRRP in conjunction with OSPF it will solve the load balancing and fail over issue. (apparently)
To Dannyboy, I have sent a mail to you, I really hope someone can help with this otherwise it means buying a load balacing / fail over piece of hardware. This just means that there is now something else that can go wrong.
Danny Boy,
I was wondering if the setup you have would work the same way we do it with a Linux box and a whole lot of scripting.
We basically have a system setup that like this:
Bonding Box at colo with 3 OC3 of bandwidth on different providers.
Bonding Box at customers with 4 ADSL or what ever mix they may have.
We tunnel bond all the customers back to the colo so that they have full upload and download and blocks of IPs from us.
We are not doing any kind of NAT of DNS tricks to make it work.
Also the failover is great.
The only problem is that it’s not that easy for me to use, there is only one guy here that can set it up the way it should be.
I tried to get MT to do the same thing and never could. I played with it for 5 weeks.
Do you think you can get this to work?