On Oct 11, 2013, at 12:27 PM, William Waites <wwaites@tardis.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
I'm having a discussion with a small network in a part of the world where bandwidth is scarce and multiple DSL lines are often used for upstream links. The topic is policy-based routing, which is being described as "load balancing" where end-user traffic is assigned to a line according to source address.
Doing this with actual routing, in a way that doesn't become fragile is hard. It is not impossible as Jared points out, but is non-trivial. However there is a variant which is much less brittle, but is more annoying to configure with most tools. The idea is that the gateway box is a NAT, with an outbound IP on each of the two uplinks. The box can then make intelligent decisions about which provider to use based on layer 8+9 information. I've seen this done multiple times where for instance there is high bandwidth satellite, and low bandwidth terrestrial services. Latency sensitive traffic (dns, ssh, etc) are send over the low bandwidth terrestrial, while bulk downloads go over satellite. It's quite robust and useful in these situations. Making open source boxes do this is possible, but quite annoying in my experience. I don't think it's possible to make a Cisco or Juniper do this sort of thing in any reasonable way. A number of manufacturers have developed custom solutions around this idea. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/