aerotive
join:2005-04-23
Fayetteville, AR
| questions about bonding DSL & cable; dual-WAN routers
I telecommute from my home office and am exploring options to improve the reliability of my connectivity. My rather primitive system now is that when my DSL connection dies, I disconnect the DSL modem, hook up my cable modem, and usually have to reboot, reconnect to customers, etc.
There are a bunch of dual-WAN routers that promise failover support, ie when one connection dies the router is supposed to switch to the backup automatically. The crucial thing for me is if I'm connected to a customer's system, and the main connection goes down, the failover will be transparent to the customer and the connection won't have to be reinitiated. And I won't have to reboot and/or screw around with settings.
Can dual-WAN routers provide this sort of transparency? Any recommendations on specific routers, things to watch out for, etc? |
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tschmidt
Premium,MVM
join:2000-11-12
Milford, NH
 ·Hollis Hosting
 ·Verizon Online DSL
·Fairpoint Communic..
| Most dual WAN router also load balance. So as requests from the LAN arrive the router sends some out WAN1 and some out WAN2. Under normal circumstances both WAN links are utilized improving overall performance even though a specific single session will only utilize one of the WAN links.
How do you connect to the customer's system? If one link goes down from your customer's perspective it will look like a connection originated from a different IP address. Assuming you are using IPsec or SSL/TLS session it will need to be reestablished. You won't need to reboot but you will have to reinitialize the customer session.
If on the other hand you are using some sort of Cookie mechanism so customer doesn't care what IP is being used fallback will be transparent.
/tom |
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Anav
Sarcastic Llama? Naw, Just Acerbic
Premium
join:2001-07-16
Dartmouth, NS | reply to aerotive
The term bonding is different from load balancing and failover. Its a very expensive proposition that includes the ISP. Most decent dual wan routers should do what you want. |
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