A simple loadbalancing setup.

Hardware MikroTik hardware general
1

Dear Routerboarders,

I am setting up a home office and think I need fairly bulletproof Internet connectivity. I have a home DSL connection and want to get another DSL connection from a different provider to provide failover in case the main DSL connection goes down. I also want, as much as possible, for the connections to be loadbalanced and am investigating solutions to achieve this. The attached prospective network diagram should illustrate how I see the setup working and I am ready to purchase a RB450 and have it shipped across the world to be able to do this.
home-redundant-net.png

  1. Would the RB750 be able to failover automatically if one link goes down?
  2. Would the RB750 be able to loadbalance the links?
    2a. What connections would not be loadbalanced? torrent downloads? https sessions?
    2b. Would it be possible to have http downloads, say, be loadbalanced automatically from both links? Meaning that if a file consists of the English alphabet, would it be possible to configure the RB750 so that a-m is downloaded from DSL1 and n-z is downloaded from DSL2?
2
  1. Yes.
  2. Yes.
    2a. Use PCC and load balance by internal source IP address, that way all traffic from one client is transmitted through the same ISP. Less balancing, more stability.
    2b. No.

http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Manual:PCC

3

Thanks so much for the quick reply. I think I will indeed bite the bullet and have a second connection put into my house. The use-case scenario is such that my main workstation will be the primary user of the Internet bandwidth. I took a look at http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Per-Traffic_Load_Balancing But unlike the scenario in that link, I want only SSL and P2P traffic to use a discrete link – the rest of the traffic load should be spread out over the 2 links. Would this be possible?