this is my network layout. (attached picture)
Will it be possible to route client group 1 to ADSL 1 and client group 2 to ADSL 2?
i need to have all connections go thru a proxy plus have the ability to route specific clients to a specific gateway. does anyone here know whether that will be at all possible?
It won’t be possible. Proxies take connections, terminate them on themselves, and then fetch the content for the client. Once they have fetched it they returned it. Therefore a proxy splits what would normally be a client/server connection and makes it two connections. Your WAN routers will only ever see the connection from the proxy, and will be entirely unaware the two user groups exist.
Also, in your network diagram the RouterOS router is before the proxy. The RouterOS router doesn’t do anything about putting packets on the two ADSL links - the pfSense box does.
thanks for the reply!
ok i understand that clearly. But how about if i use the mikrotik web proxy? and i leave out the squid and pfsense. will i be able to route to specific gateways while the wb proxy is enabled and all traffic is routed through the proxy?
Nope. Same principle. The connection the proxy makes has NOTHING to do with the original connection from the user that prompted the proxy to fetch content. You can’t make a routing decision based on properties that connection simply doesn’t have. The source IP is the router itself.
i see, thanks a lot for the help.
btw what would you recommend for a small wisp who wants to speed up the network via caching or any other means? here the adsl speed goes up to 10MB, but i need more than that as i have about 35 users, so i have to have more than one adsl. and the reason for wanting to split up traffic is for certain guys (like heavy downloaders) to be routed to a “downloader” line and the users who mostly browse gets routed to the standard line.
also, off topic, does large ISPs use transparant proxies and many wans or is it just one connections?
A proxy would only work for web traffic (HTTP), so you could just dedicate one WAN link to that, and use the other for everything else.
What do you mean by “large ISP”? A large ISP would have lots of links with other ISPs (peering), and set up a rather complicated billing system where they charge each other for transit. A large ISP also wouldn’t proxy things for users, but would get content providers to mirror their content onto the ISP’s network so that it’s “free” because it runs over the infrastructure you already own. Large ISPs have millions of customers.
A larger WISP with hundreds or thousands of customers would most definitely run multiple uplinks with multiple providers (two ADSL lines back to the same CO aren’t really redundant) and possibly run some caching proxies, but really the majority of all traffic nowadays is stuff like people watching Hulu or Netflix. You can’t cache that. Caching a few web sites here and there doesn’t really gain you all that much in terms of WAN traffic.