[LARTC] Load Balancing with Instant Messenger traffic?

[LARTC] Load Balancing with Instant Messenger traffic?

[Jared Ballou]

Hi, I have a box set up to distribute load over 4 satellite connections. 
I cannot use Instant Messenger programs with it as it stands, I believe 
that using iproute2, the path to the server is not being locked to one 
interface, so the IM servers are getting user traffic from multiple IPs. 
When I set just one default gateway, IMs work great. When I use the 
scope global/nexthop method of load balancing, IM programs will keep 
disconnecting and needing to reconnect. Is there a way (besides bonding) 
to make IM traffic locked into a certain interface? I'd like to do it 
balanced too since Yahoo webcams take up 30% of the bandwidth here, but 
if I have to I guess I could forward all that traffic out one modem and 
everything else out another. Thanks.
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Re: [LARTC] Load Balancing with Instant Messenger traffic?

[Ryan Castellucci]

I've seen this issue as well, it has something to do with route
cacheing, you loose connections every 5 or 10 minutes, right?  You
have a couple options....

Use iproute to create rules to tie each user to a specific connection.
 I've done this before and it works ok.

Another idea I just had would be to use the iptables CONNMARK and MARK
extensions to tag connections with what interface they initialy went
out on, then use iproute rules to make routing decisions based on the
packet mark.

I can probably whip up some example stuff if you need it.

On 1/16/06, Jared Ballou <jared.ballou@us.army.mil> wrote:
> Hi, I have a box set up to distribute load over 4 satellite connections.
> I cannot use Instant Messenger programs with it as it stands, I believe
> that using iproute2, the path to the server is not being locked to one
> interface, so the IM servers are getting user traffic from multiple IPs.
> When I set just one default gateway, IMs work great. When I use the
> scope global/nexthop method of load balancing, IM programs will keep
> disconnecting and needing to reconnect. Is there a way (besides bonding)
> to make IM traffic locked into a certain interface? I'd like to do it
> balanced too since Yahoo webcams take up 30% of the bandwidth here, but
> if I have to I guess I could forward all that traffic out one modem and
> everything else out another. Thanks.
> _______________________________________________
> LARTC mailing list
> LARTC@mailman.ds9a.nl
> http://mailman.ds9a.nl/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lartc
>


--
Ryan Castellucci http://ryanc.org/
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