Dual Nic Load Balancing Solution

masterkoppa · 2012-05-11 07:26:50

Hi,

I have a very peculiar situation. I'm currently a college student with access to an almost unlimited network. But the problem is that the network limits each IP to 30 Mb/s. I have 2 nics at my disposal and have tried two options so far:

bonding
two independent nic, let network manager take care of it

I set-up bonding and got it working, but it seems limited to roughly the same speeds as a single nic, but I can see the network being slit between the two nics evenly. This is what lead me to conclude that since I have a single ip address it's limiting it by IP not mac addresses. Here I might occasionally spike above the limits but not consistently.

With the network manager solution, Im basically thrown at random and can occasionally get higher than limited speeds. Specially with torrenting clients.

Are there any other useful options that I could explore, my next stop was a load balancing routing table but I want to see what you guys know before I keep trying weirder solutions.

Thanks in advance

falconindy · 2012-05-11 12:56:39

There's no problem here. Please don't try to circumvent the policies your network admins are defining.

masterkoppa · 2012-05-11 17:49:10

falconindy wrote:

There's no problem here. Please don't try to circumvent the policies your network admins are defining.

To be honest I wasn't really trying to do this for malicious purposes, it more of a little learning experience of mine. But I can understand and respect that it might seem like I'm trying to circumvent security policies. Thank you for your time anyways.

baronmax · 2012-05-11 21:01:35

falconindy wrote:

There's no problem here. Please don't try to circumvent the policies your network admins are defining.

Oh come on, we'd all do the same thing if we could double our available bandwidth!

I really can't provide much of a solution. I did this back with my dialup days, many many eons ago. I used 2 phone lines bonded to get my 56k speeds doubled. It was a gigantic pain in the rear to set up back then, as well. However, I'm lucky to remember what I had for breakfast, so remembering how I did something 15+ years ago is pretty much out of the question.

I'm sure linux can do this, but I'm guessing one of the BSDs would have information about how to do this written up somewhere. This is right up BSD's alley. They have all kinds of load-balancing code built into their network stack (Amazon actually had a lot of trouble keeping up with demand when they were getting big, so they wrote up their own networking stack, which has since been returned to the FreeBSD project, iirc). So it might be worth your time to check that out and possibly run a mini BSD setup on an old computer or something to route the bandwidth to an internal network (of course this would likely require three NICs in a single computer...so more complexity there too). Some of the problem you are running into may be due to the network just being congested, which could explain the differing speeds. Then there may be an issue with certain servers not being able to push out 60 MB/s worth of data to you, for whatever reason.

Either way, please keep us posted about what you do and how you do it, I'm anxious to find out the final solution here.

Best of luck to you.

fukawi2 · 2012-05-11 22:18:47

You're on the right track with the multiple routing tables... This (currently unmaintained) script I wrote a while ago might assist:
https://github.com/fukawi2/pb-route

Arch Linux

#1 2012-05-11 07:26:50

Dual Nic Load Balancing Solution

#2 2012-05-11 12:56:39

Re: Dual Nic Load Balancing Solution

#3 2012-05-11 17:49:10

Re: Dual Nic Load Balancing Solution

#4 2012-05-11 21:01:35

Re: Dual Nic Load Balancing Solution

#5 2012-05-11 22:18:47

Re: Dual Nic Load Balancing Solution

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