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View Full Version : Running Cable/DSL together


drmerl
11-19-00, 02:34 PM
I am lucky enough to have both cable and DSL in my area and to my home. My main question is for those of you that might be able to give me some advice on the Win2K routing table to allow some better sharing of the two connections.

Here's my box...
Win2k Pro (sp1), REG already tweaked for cable/dsl, two 3COM (3C905B-TX), Cable is Cacks@home, DSL is Covad 1.5/384, Linksys router/firewall in front of cable, with the DSL handled with another firewall.

I've already tried connection teaming with the two companies to use it (midpoint, and the other one) and I found it's not as ideal as they say. With all the NATs and crap going on things can get quite screwed up. I also have various servers running on this box. For instance..with teaming and you're on napster you can end up losing your connections as the software goes back and forth with different connections. Also the actual amount of time it spends "teaming" is small, and it's of no real help with large single files (most FTP sites won't allow multiple connections). There are hardware solutions, but from what I know are in the thousands.

Under Win2k in the advanced prefs you can say what connection you want to appear "first". It helps a little, if I'm leeching with DSL (usually ends up being the default gateway as the latency times are low)I can sometimes get the cable to start downloading and can get combined speeds well in to the 4000Kbps range (via DUMeter).

What I'd like to find out is if I can put in some creative static routes to try and "balance" (maybe fiddle with metrics) the two connections.

Oooorrr...if someone knows of a hardware router to accomplish this I might be able to purchase that "research" under company expense. =)

Kip Patterson
11-19-00, 02:59 PM
The basic limitation is that no matter what you do, the two modems have two different IP addresses. Internet sites don't support this. You need an ISP that will split traffic intended for a single IP into two paths, then on your end you need a method of recombining them. In today's world, that won't happen at any reasonable price.

drmerl
11-19-00, 03:48 PM
Ahh, then you know exactly what I'm talking about then. =)

How bout a semi fix kinda thing that if response time gets below X on a particular connection (like of it was saturated) then it would fallover to the secondary?

Do you know of the specific hardware you're referring to? Is there something from Cisco or anything like that?

What would you do to make two connections work?

Philip
11-19-00, 03:58 PM
You can get any 3xxx Cisco router and it will do the trick I suppose... You can ask Bouncer for details.

Other than that, there are a couple of software solutions, check them out:
http://www.midcore.com/
http://www.surfdoubler.com/

Kip Patterson
11-19-00, 04:10 PM
Philip's response covers part of your question.

The problem remains that, as viewed from the perspective of the site you are connecting to, you have two IP addresses. That limits anything that you can do independantly of your ISP(s). But, with software as he lists, you should be able to do one thing on one site and another thing on another, for example, a download while browsing. Watching high resolution video, no, because the site feeding you can't split its packets between the two IP's.

drmerl
11-19-00, 04:50 PM
Ok, thanx for the responses.

It's looking like it would very difficult to bond the two connections together. But it's cool for me to alternate between the two.

I've checked out the surfdoubler and the midpoint software. I think I might need to go back and spend more time with that software to get the NAT stuff straight.

Is there something simpler to do? Any routing magic to try and get alternating connections?

If a connection originates on DSL, then the gateway switches to that, and return data should continue along that connection, but is there any way to switch my gateway to the cable? Even if I have to run a small script manually it would do the trick for those times I want to do some big napster leeching.

Also...I'd like to learn more about the routing under win2k, to try and see if I can figure something out, any resources that you can point me to?

dmsmed
11-19-00, 06:35 PM
www.Fatpipeinc (http://www.Fatpipeinc) take a look, they say you can combine DSL and cable.

glc1
11-19-00, 07:54 PM
drmerl, check out Bouncer's reply here (http://www.speedguide.net/ubb/Forum2/HTML/005710.html)