[PLUG] Connection pooling/teaming and ISPs

[Aaron Ten Clay]

Matt Alexander said:
> On Mon, 6 Sep 2004, Aaron Ten Clay wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the input, however bridging is not what I'm looking for. I
>> want
>> an intelligent routing solution that will take a browser's requests for
>> objects over HTTP and split them among more than one logical internet
>> connection. I'd really like something that could take all TCP sessions
>> and
>> load balance them over multiple logical internet connections. This
>> process
>> would create a single virtual internet connection for the network which
>> uses NAT, so the end computers don't know they are using multiple
>> connections to retrieve data faster.
>
> It's not possible to have, for example, two 1Mbs connections and
> download a single file at 2Mbs because of the way TCP/IP works.  But
> if you have two users downloading a file then one user can be directed
> out the first WAN connection and the other user can be directed out
> the second WAN connection.  Here's some info on multiple connections
> with Linux:
>
> http://lartc.org/howto/lartc.rpdb.multiple-links.html
>
> There's also several commercial products that will do this for you:
>
> http://www.xincom.com/
> http://www.hawkingtech.com/prodList.php?FamID=44
> http://www.symantec.com/smallbiz/gtw/

Thanks Matt, I am learning a lot from lartc.org. I wonder why google
didn't find it for me. I have heard of making HTTP proxies use range
headers to get parts of a file over multiple connections, making it
possible to download a single file at 2mbps over two 1mbps connections.
However, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of open source software
(that I can find) at this time to do such a thing.

I'm fairly familiar with the HTTP protocol and it's something I may want
to explore coding myself one of these days, but for now I will use the
load balancing howto on the lartc.org website.

Thanks again for the URLs.

-- 
Aaron Ten Clay