bonding balance tlb /alb problem

RouterOS General
1

I am trying make a bonding balance alb with 2 routerboard 433 3.20 routeros
Setup is very simple. 2 ethernet ports ( eth2 and eth3) connected with cross over cables.
Eth1 is input and output.

Because in the final project I will be using 2 ADSL line that are not the same speed.
A speed limit on eth2 and eth3 on the RB433 on the left side. Right side is full speed as this board will be in the data centre on fibre.
RX/TX eth2 8Mbit/1Mbit
RX/TX eth3 4Mbit/1Mbit

Some more config info.
Left side 192.168.0.240
Eth1 with bonding1 in bridge.
Bonding eth2 and eth3

Right side 192.168.0.241
Eth1 with bonding1 in bridge.
Bonding eth2 and eth3

\

  1. Bonding with broadcast is working. Simple setup to start with as there is no need to link monitoring. A good fail save configuration. Max speed 4Mbit.

  2. Bonding with balance rr is working. Link monitoring on mii type 2. Max speed is 2 * speed of the slowest Ethernet interface ( ETH3). Removing cable from eth3 will give almost no speed difference

  3. Bonding with balance xor is working. Link monitoring on mii type 2. Max speed is speed of the fastest link

  4. bonding with balance tlb Link monitoring on mii type 2. Not working. When I do a search with winbox I can see the unit on the other side but not able to connect. Running a ping will work for some time, ( about 9 pings) then lost again 40 pings, again for 10 pings ……

  5. Bonding with balance alb.. Well that is also not working, but not very strange as balance tlb is not working.


    What could be wrong ?.

Nstreme Dual vs. Bonding Interesting results.
Bonding RB1000 to two switches
RouterOS V3.24 release
2

Reply from mikrotiksupport:

Driver support is required for tbl/alb to work properly. These modes are not
supported by interface drivers of that board. Use any other mode on that
RouterBoard.

3

Reply from mikrotiksupport:

  1. Are there routerboards that does support this type of bonding ?.
    None of RouterBoards support alb and tlb

  2. Is it possible to do this type of bonding with EOIP tunnel ?.
    You can’t use it on EoIP.

  3. Do you have any information of hardware that does have diver support for this type of bonding ?.
    Intel adapters, Some expensive HP cards support these modes. You have to look
    in adapters specification to make sure alb/tlb is supported    .

4

According to the changelog, it is supported on some models (4xx included) but I have been unable to get anything working with alb or tlb. Erratic behavior.

ALB sounds like the perfect answer for those of us who have 2 links which are not the same speed, and we want to be able to utilize the full speed of both links, but have either one take the full load if the other fails.

Anyone have any ideas?

5

modes alb and tlb are not designed to work in such manner as in your diagram (for such purposes use balance-rr)

alb and tlb modes will use all available bandwidth for communications to all connected clients.

Sample setup

Router(R1) has configured balance alb on two interfaces (100MBps each), C1 to Cn - clients connected to switch

R1
| |
| |
| |
Switch
| | |
C1 C2 .. Cn

in such setup router R1 will be able to use 200Mbps total bandwidth to communicate with Cn clients.
i hope this explanation is clear.

In case if mode is tlb, only outgoing traffic will be balanced, incoming packets from clients will arrive on interface which is configured as primary.

6

Any further eplanation? RR doesn’t work well when you want redundancy AND full throughput. For example, say we have a 25 mbps wireless link as our primary and a 10 mbps wireless link as our backup. If you use RR, you’ll never get more than 20mbps because the 10 meg link is the limiting factor. 15 megs on our primary link gets left unused. To further worsen things, say the backup link gets bad and drops to 5 megs, we’ll be limited to 10 megs total throughput even though 25 meg primary link may be just fine.

The solution I want is to be able to utilize a combination of the total throughput (25 megs + 10 megs = 35 megs) when the links are both performing well. If the backup drops to 1 meg, we’d still be running at 26 megs.

Does that make sense? How would I do that?

Thanks,
Joe

7

In my diagram from previous post, replace switch with routerboard where all wireless and ethernet interfaces are bridged. That should work as well.

8

I know this is an old post but I require help.

I have the following setup:

Mikrotik R1 eth1 ---->(wireless link 10mbps) ----> Mikrotik R2 eth1
Mikrotik R1 eth2 ---->(wireless link 20mbps) ----> Mikrotik R2 eth2

I want to bridge links so that I can get 30mbps.
What should I chose, obviously balance-rr wont work. Should it be balance-alb or balance-tlb.
What I require i.e. 30mpbs can this really happen?

And what mikrotik router should I use if there are some specifics.

Regards

9

This is the reply i got from Mikrotik Support.

The balance-alb/tlb is RouterOS feature which is supported in all RouterBoard devices and there should not be problems achieving 30Mbps throughput with any of them.

nice reply, waited for that for days… :slight_smile: