[ale] Does anybody have experience with a load-balancing/failover distro?

[david w. millians]

On 9/29/2010 10:39 AM, Michael Trausch wrote:
> While I am quite sure that it would be possible to load-balance with
> NAT connections, I don't think it would be terribly useful.  I often
> see a place that will have a high-speed primary link, and a very low
> speed backup link.  Failover is far more appropriate.

In this case, it will be a... let's see. 4 schools =  a 12 megabit link 
from AT&T, and I *believe* a 10 megabit from their cable operator.

> Now, if some place has two identical links that come in different
> ways, way, a T1 from place A and a T1 from place B, and there were a
> way to bond the two together such that they would work as a single
> virtual pipe and subsequently suffer the failure of one of them, then
> I think that load-balancing would be quite appropriate.  But I have
> yet to encounter such a situation, personally.

Well, there is no school district that I know of that really has enough 
bandwidth. Most places, for example, have to block youtube just because 
it kills all the bandwidth. A single school is allocated, with e-rate et 
al, a 3megabit connection with (I think) it currently set at a 20% 
guarantee of service. That could be a 33% though, and in reality most 
schools get pretty close to their full 3 megabits. But, again, that's a 
3 meg connection for a whole school.

So, if the other connection is anything above 5 megabits, it'll make a 
noticeable difference. Load sharing would be Good.

And as said, I'll do roll-my-own if we need to- I'm just hoping that 
somebody can say, oh yeah, I setup a ClarkConnect/ClearOS box to do just 
that, and thumbs up. Jim's links are good, and appreciated.