Re: [gentoo-server] network load balancing

[Robert Sanders]

On Thursday 22 July 2004 07:04 pm, Sancho2k.net Lists wrote:
> There's bound to be similar functionality available in Linux somewhere,
> but I remembered OpenBSD's pf supporting something like this. It
> supports address pooling and round-robining between multiple outbound
> connections.
>
>   http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/pools.html#outgoing
>
> Usually something like this might be done using BGP and some routing
> magic to set policy on routing out through these. If you were to
> investigate setting this up, Quagga (formerly zebra) has a bpgd and so
> does OpenBSD (introduced in 3.5 or 3.6, don't remember. Now a userland
> bgpd native to the OS.)

Unfortunatly, neither one of these will fragment the file and allow both pipes 
to upload.  Also, you won't be able to negotiate a BGP with the upstream.  
Even if you could, BGP isn't much more than a smart load balancer.

The only thing I can think of would be to use something like bittorrent to 
seed the file, and make it availible to both networks at once.  Then the file 
could be sucked out of both networks, in chunks, and put back together.  
Also, taking this idea you may be able to use the underlying fundamentals and 
create a point to point link that can balance the two, but I haven't seen it 
done yet.  Also, it wouldn't work for the world unless you had a proxy of 
sorts on the fat end of your connections.

In your origional post, you mention uploading ISO's.  Probably the highest 
bandwidth but highest latency option availible to everyone, mail service.  
You could probably snail mail large files to someone on a backbone faster 
than uploading at dual dialup or ISDN.  Not pretty, but not horrid either.  
People send me DVD's and CD's all the time, because their residential 
connection can't upload it at any reasonable speed.

Rob