[KLUG Members] Connection Teaming multiple Internet connections?

[Bob Kanaley]

Does anyone know of an easy way to setup a gateway or proxy that could be
connected to both cable broadband and satellite Internet connections such
that the gateway or proxy would automatically use the connection with the
lowest amount of traffic (fastest connection) to retrieve http or ftp
requests? Any pointers would be appreciated.

Background:
Although I recently had Comcast small business broadband cable Internet
installed, I am very disappointed with the transfer rates I am getting. It
was advertised as capable of 3MB/sec rather than the residential 1MB/sec. So
far I haven’t seen anything faster than about 200K/sec and at times it
chokes down to a miniscule 5 or 6KB/sec.

I had hoped that the cable would be a more reliable and faster connection
than the satellite connection that we have had for the last couple of years.
Surprisingly, only two days ago I downloaded a 16MB file over the satellite
at just over 1MB/sec. This is the fastest download I have ever had. This
prompted me to consider connection teaming to achieve greater reliability
and availability.

The satellite connection is via the USB port on a W2K box running WinProxy
software. WinProxy can be setup to cascade to another proxy. The cable modem
goes directly to a 5-port switch and from there is connected to eth0 of an
LRP/LEAF firewall router. Both boxes then have a NIC on the LAN. Currently
the M$ clients on the LAN use the proxy setting in IE to access the
transparent proxy to the satellite. I setup a couple of Winbloz boxes to use
the LRP box as gateway to access the Internet to evaluate the cable
connection.

Bob

Robert V. Kanaley
Manager Information Systems
Agdia, Inc.
rvk@agdia.com
http://www.agdia.com