Trunking connections

[wc_fbsd at xxiii.com]

At 05:19 AM 4/21/2006, Michael Landin Hostbaek wrote:
>In a branch office, I've got two ADSL lines setup (with two 
>different ISPs) - one of them are supposed to work as backup line, 
>but since it is a ADSL flat fee line, I was wondering if there's a 
>way of setting up some sort of a trunk with FreeBSD, so I can make 
>use of the extra bandwith.

I came up with a hack that has worked well for us.  We have a frac-T1 
line (12/24 ths) that is very reliable, but costs ~$600/month and 
only gets about 70KB/sec.  We also have a connection from the local 
cable company;  it's not terribly reliable, but it's only $40/month, 
and gets 460KB/sec.

I setup squid proxy with the option "tcp outgoing address 12.x.x.x" 
where the address is that of the cable NIC.  Then configured ipfw to 
forward any packets with the 12' address to the cable gateway.  We 
get very fast proxied speed for web browsing, ftp, and other bulk 
transfers.  But the regular traffic still goes over the T1 line.

Sorta kludgy, but since I'm no routing expert, I was pleased with the 
results  :)

   -Wayne