I hope this is a smart suggestion. I believe that integrating some tiny smart load balancer would make it easy for lots of us when managing multiple resources within a LAN. What do you think of Pen :
It seems to be the right stuff to implement in RouterOS.
Best regards.
you can already do load balancing and policy routing in RouterOS v2.9. What features are lacking now?
Normis,
I do already use policy routing for load balancing. But it is not straitforward and needs to be built with a complex set of rules.
I suggest that you take a look at Pen that is a tiny footprint piece of nix software. I would hope for a balancing module that would use Pen type algorithm that keeps track of clients, not simple round-robin.
regards
Hi Normis
Maybe it is good time to introduce connection-orientated ecmp? As you know ecmp is still useless (2.9.x) when trying to connect more wan lines - lan hosts are still transferred from one path to another, not carrying connections (causing file transfer errors, chats disconnecting etc). Connections are not tracked well. The other hand - policy routing is not always sufficient alternative - for example, it is hard to divide bandwidth among multiple gateways on edge router when using second level nats inside network for more hotspot gateways and the trafic to hotspot is routed. ECMP would do this nice since every new connection or at least destination (but not host’s whole traffic) could be potentially routed thru next gateway.
ECMP is small, simply (zero config), nice and great idea - but until does not track connections - it is completly useless.
see you in krakow 
regards
kj
ecmp does track connections (port pairs) and will keep 1 connection on one gateway… thats the whole point. If your application does not use connections however it will break, ie Instant messaging, etc.
Sam
“A new gateway is chosen for each new source/destination IP pair. It means that, for example, one FTP connection will use only one link, but new connection to a different server will use another link. ECMP routing has another good feature - single connection packets do not get reordered and therefore do not kill TCP performance.”
Supposedly MLPPP is part of the presently used kernel. That would be a nice option to tap into.
Sam, have you used ecmp and tried this? Id does not track connections correctly. Simply file download via http is often broken - so it is not true, that port pairs are kept on one gateway.
BUT I have not tried it again from couple of recent versions of MT.
I’ll test it again with current 2.9 build and confirm are you right or not.
thanks and regards.
kj