Need help with load balancing.

A

Ashbringer

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I have this weird topology on my store. It's one leased line and 3 aDSL lines that all together forwarding traffic on single clients for different purposes. It's leased for games, adsl for http general traffic, adsl (2) for youtube traffic only and an adsl (3) for downloads. All working together without changing gateway every time. You know if I could do something similar to windows server OS?
 
What are you trying to accomplish? I think you'd be better off with a gateway load balancing appliance. The only 'realistic' way to accomplish an unrealistic scenario that springs to mind is VMs using different VLANs assigned to different gateways.
 
You can do this with pf (openbsd/freebsd) and pfsense at least
//Danne
 
Wow, Why the split? Redundancy or what? I'd think that you might be able to have a better experience with a higher DSL package and proper QoS configured as opposed to 3 separate DSL lines.
 
Thanks diizzy I'll take a look into those. Is it possible to do it with route ADD command?

Nate7311 it's for a gaming cafe. It's to make sure online games don't lag when people browse the net.
 
So what you are saying is you want to use a different gateway based on the type of traffic?
 
How many stations? I can understand wanting Pings as low as possible (leased line), but the rest should be able to be accomplished either by good QoS or a proper NextGen firewall with Application aware routing. Something like a PaloAlto, or Fortigate.

Is the proposed scenario already running or are you asking for help to devise it, or clean it up?
 
Pfsense can do this. Infact I used to do this with 2 connections my self.
 
Jay_oasis said:
Pfsense can do this. Infact I used to do this with 2 connections my self.
Click to expand...
how would you distinguish browsing from downloading/streaming in pfSense? I don't see anything for how much data has been transferred in the floating rules...
 
I've also used pfsense to do this. Multiple connections, one firewall, load balanced.

pfSense works in a round robin way to load balance. So first attempted connection goes out first dsl line, second connection attempt goes out second dsl line, 3rd then goes back to first dsl line. You can AFAIK do this with as many connections as you like.

You can use basic routing (by ip or port/service type) to define which gateway a connection goes out, and then anything not defined would be done in the round robin way of load balancing. If you however wanted to define each type of allowed traffic, and the connection it uses...... that's certainly possible as well.
 
Keep in mind you need different gateways for each WAN connection so the balancer can tell which gateway is which and if/when it goes down. I doubt your DSL connections will have different gateways, so the easiest way is to leave the modem in routing mode and set each modem to a different network, eg:
Modem A: 192.168.1.1 -> pfSense WAN1
Modem B: 192.168.2.1 -> pfSense WAN2
Modem C: 192.168.3.1 -> pfSense WAN3

You can make certain types of traffic 'sticky', so that it comes and goes on the same WAN interface- this will be necessary for https traffic and may be desired for other traffic.
 
The whole point is to run 1 OS on the machine. It's already doing it with CentOS. Preferably Windows 2008.
 
There's probably a solution on Linux too, otherwise as you've told OpenBSD/FreeBSD does this fine too and most "Linux-applications" also work on FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
//Danne
 
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