Load Balancing two FTTC connections

[rtho782]

So I've been playing with two FTTC connections (one Talktalk, one Plusnet, for resiliency).

Connectify Dispatch is very good at load balancing and makes it pretty seamless. It insists on having a NIC for each route, rather than just two gateways on the same NIC, so I've had to put 2nd NICs in the two PCs I'm using it on (then just connect both NICs to the same switch and it runs on different subnets).

I thought I'd try a more "hardware" solution and picked up a Draytek 2860ac. We use the N version at work and it works well, but we don't load balance with it (just failover, or specific IP ranges via specific WANs).

It's awful.

Draytek apparently don't know the meaning of the word "balance" as this just shoves all traffic down a single WAN ignoring the other.

I'm about to send it back and build a ClearOS box. Any thoughts?

 

[rtho782]

Even with two different computers sending traffic, and the one sending the majority of the traffic using Bittorrent, it still only uses one line.

Many speedtest sites use more than one TCP connection - e.g. Speedtest.net. Thinkbroadband does two tests, a x1 test (which should have course max one line only) and a x6 test (which with connectify maxes both lines).

Steam downloads are multiple connections, and with connectify I see both lines utilised.

I've actually found that if I repeatedly pause and restart steam downloads, the draytek will (~5% of the time) decide to distribute the connections correctly and I'll use both lines.

http://imgur.com/P8U9ZYE <--- shows a very biased "balance".

I worked around this to a point by setting the router to route 128.0.0.0/1 over WAN2, so half the IPv4 address space went over one connection and half over the other. Worked well for torrents.

I've sent the router back now, I'm living with Connectify until I get round to building a ClearOS or pfSense box from random spare parts.

 

[rtho782]

2nd the mikrotik call.
I got an rb2011 last week and it's bloomin amazing what it can do.

I'm looking at them right now, there doesn't seem to be much in terms of info about, which is annoying!

Were I to use a 2011UiAS-IN (seems no point in the WiFi version as I'll end up using an 802.11ac router as an access point, I have a couple), would it cope with two PPPoE connections?

I feel like 600MHz cpu is a bit wimpy, and the device is almost too cheap at £100!!

 

[rtho782]

Given it's less than £100 I think I'm gonna just order one, it's worth that much just to add to my pile of gadgets and play with it

 

[rtho782]

pfsense multi wan?

Worked well when i had two LLU ADSL connections and you can set traffic rules for certain traffic etc? Free but you need the hardware (2 x modem/routers, 3 PCI Network cards, machine to run pfsense etc)

Exactly what I was going to do (that or ClearOS). I have a couple of PCIe NICs laying around, and an i5 3570 + z77 motherboard, but it means an ATX PC in the hallway.

I have some random MiniITX boards, but they are only Atoms, and only have one NIC and one PCIe slot.

If the mikrotik does the job and is 11w TDP and small, so much the better.