[KLUG Members] Dual internet connection devices?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >Are there easy, hardware-style products that'll help with this?  He
> >mentioned ZyWall, which will do both dual internet connections and VPN
> >(which is required - he will have a VPN to us)
> >Any suggestions, stories, or anecdotes?
> My firewall / NAT router is an old 500Mhz SuSE 9.3 box with 2 NICs.  If 
> you need to do 2 redundant Internet connections, drop a third card in it 
> or (less likely to work) connect both modems through a small hub.  The 
> YAST firewall configuration module is excellent, although you might have 
> to edit a config file to do fancy stuff.  It's very well documented, 
> though, to the point that even a Windows guy could figure it out!  I've 
> never tried this, but if you set the routing to use both of the Internet 
> connections with different metrics, shouldn't the machine use the lower 
> one but fail over to the secondary if the first one goes down?  

Technically, yes.  But in operation that works poorly;  existing
connections are lost, the timeout to for many applications to realize
the connection is gone is up to five minutes, and depending upon some
gritty issues you may also loose connections when the first interface
comes up again  (ISPs may not cooperate when you start pushing packets
back up the other pipe,  many run some rather odd blocking rules).  This
works better if you have a static IP address,  two interfaces with
dynamic addresses will reduce a grown man to tears - since they go down
and come back up (operationally anyway) on a regular basis.  Ugh.

> sure that the DSL and cable "modem" of the primary is just a modem not a 
> NAT router, though, as that would complicate things.