Re: [LARTC] Commercial Alternatives

["Kirby C. Bohling" <kbohling@birddog.com>]

On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 14:24, Brad Davidson wrote:
> William L. Thomson Jr. said:
> 
> > Yes, but not in sense that traffic comes in one interface and goes out
> > another. From my understanding the main benefit of the SysMaster
> > solution was the number of connections being balanced had nothing to do
> > with the number of interfaces.
> 
> ... so it would go in and then come out again on the same interface?
> 
> I'm sure it's great as far as ease of configuration, but to tell the truth
> I'd rather plug in an extra cable or two, and not halve my available
> bandwidth by doubling the per-link traffic.
> 
> I guess it's a very targeted product, I just think it sounds rather silly.

I'm guessing it has two interfaces.  Hence the sentence:

> > Yes, but not in sense that traffic comes in one interface and goes out

The one interface connects to the local lan.  The other connects to a
network that can route to all of your upstream providers.  This way the
load balancer doesn't charge you per physical interface.  It's no harder
to load balance 2 way then 4 way, but a lot of network equipment makers
would charge you twice as much because there are twice as many
interfaces (or would charge you a significant amount more to have 4
interfaces).

I'm guessing this is a pretty smart option assuming the aggregate
traffic leaving you network is less then 100Mbit/s.  If it's more then
100Mbit/s, you can afford better equipment.  This does have some latency
and security issues, but would seem like a reasonable idea for a lot of
small networks that want to split out traffic down two providers.  If I
was a window's admin, and didn't know enought about Linux, I'd think
that was one really cool piece of equipment... *grin*.

	Thanks,
		Kirby


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