Hey folks,
I have a Cable connection and a DSL connection, each with 2MB upload and I wanted to bond these together to give a higher aggregated output. Like a few other people, I have experienced less than favourable results when trying to utilise bonding utilising EoIP and PPTP on a routerboard, struggling to achieve even 1MB consistently, and I wasn’t able to use L2TP as our cable provider uses L2TP on our connection and it will not forward L2TP traffic.
I have seen the various VPN bonding appliances available (such as peplink) and whilst they seem like a possible tool to help achieve my goal, I cannot justify the pricing of the devices.
Finally, I have stumbled across ZeroShell - which is basically a linux distribution customised for routing purposes. Specifically, it supports bonding site to site VPNs using OpenVPN (UDP and TCP supported, but UDP is best for bonding due to TCP meltdown problems). I have tested it and I have managed a respectable 3.5MB (via 2x 2MB upload) between 2 sites which is far better than anything I ever achieved with routerboard bonding. It’s appears to be stable and manages variances in latency okay. Future releases will also support weighted bonding to allow better utilisation of connections with different upload speeds.
I would recommend giving Zeroshell a shot if you haven’t found a suitable solution to aggregate bonding thus far. For the record, I still use my routerboard to manage all other aspects of my network, just not for site to site connectivity.
Hope this helps someone.
Kpx