I’m still contemplating at this stage, but something tells me to just get the hardware and play with this… But a few questions here.. Looking at long haul, high throughput backhaul links, I’m planning a implementation where redundancy is NB critical… Due to performance requirements (ASync links are definately a no go), I have no option here to go NStream2, which is fine. Now, due to the redundancy requirements, a second set of Mikrotik’s are installed, and a second NSteram2 link is braught into the picture…
On the Ethernet side, it’s easy enough to bring in redundancy over VRRP… But how on earth do I do this on NStream links? For this to work, all 4 radios on the WLAN must be able to see each other (default forwarding - on?), yet due to NStream2, the two masters will see each other, and the two slaves will see each other - the links will thus be independant, and VRRP will therefore not work on the Wireless segment… At the end of the day, these sites will act as a repeater (i.e. two NStream links per Mikrotik), with a drop off feed as a AP, either via a 5th radio, or Ethernet to an additional Mikrotik…
Probably you can try substitute Dual Nstreme with bonding. As Dual Nstreme link will fail if one of the tx or rx will be unavailable, as bonding provide you with redundancy, probably it might be better solution for this particular link.
Bonding allows link to work, when one of the wireless link is failed.
Thought about that as well yes, but then I still sit with Async links - which is not ideal and I want to try and avoid that. However, you’ve given me a nice idea now about bonding the two NStream links… 54MB links thus it will potentially give me a 100MB Sync link, with redundancy, which sounds peachy.
Can you bond NStream though?
I’ll see about getting some hardware together and see if I can play with this… It sounds interesting now… Would be fantastic if this will work…
I can imagine bonding instead of VRRP on Site1 and Site2.
Yes this approach should give you better troughput, especially when both Dual Nstreme links are working.
I too would suggest running the two NStreme links and then use bonding to
a) create more overall bandwidth, when both links are up and running and
b) to create fail-over when one links is going down
I have not tried bonding NStreme2 interfaces on the same machine. Bonding does only allow for slave interfaces that are “ethernet-like”, so ethernet and eoip (are the ones I know to work). Not sure if NStreme2 will work there. Worst case would be having a separate router to do the bonding of the two NStreme2-routers which would have to be connected via ethernet (cross-over-cable).
But then you again have a single point of failure, so you should think about VRRP-redundancy for the bonding-routers (no, haven’t tested that yet)…
Haven’t tested this throughput wise yet, but 4 x radio’s per site, 2 x N Stream Links running IPSec tunnels, EoIP Tunnels inside IPSec, with Bonding on the EoIP - works pretty well…
Something just tells me I’ve got heavy fragmentation waiting for me however… Will see what the performance say when I have some propper distance and antennae’s between the sites…
(no, haven’t tested that yet)…
Will see what the performance say when I have some propper distance and antennae’s between the sites…