Hi all,

I have a problem. I have a few servers in some rackspace, all linked up with a switch to a 10 Mbit uplink. Now i want a second 10 Mbit link and the traffic has to be devided between the 2 or later even 3 uplinks. How is this possible. Will the switch(3com superstack 3300) do this automatically or do i have to get some sort of router to do this.

For the clarity, both(or all three) uplinks go to the same core switch, so they have the same gateway etc. But getting 3 x 10 Mbit uplinks is cheaper then getting one 100 Mbit connection. ut the importent thing is that the traffic is devided evenly.

Thanks

Let me make sure I understand first.

You have this kind of setup right now:

--INTERNET
\--UPLINK 1
\----SWITCH
\--------BOX1
\--------BOX2
\--------BOX3

and you want:

--INTERNET
\--UPLINK 1
\--UPLINK 2
\--UPLINK 3
\----SWITCH
\--------BOX1
\--------BOX2
\--------BOX3


I'm not an expert in this area so somebody should definitly correct me but:

a) you might be able to buy a cheapo linux box with 4 interfaces, 3 upstream and 1 downstream and then just take the 3 incoming 10mbit connections and pipe them to the switch on your internal interface.

then for outbound.
b) use the IPtables que stuff to try to just distribute the outbound packets over the three interfaces. (assuming all the subnet info and such is the same for all three which I don't know how they'll do but I assume they can)

That might work...

-davidu

Your schedule is exactly what i want. And the linux box is also a thing i thought about. But the linux box will act as router now and i'm not to happy with servers behind a router. THere is always a service that will be affected etc.

Originally posted by Lmax
Your schedule is exactly what i want. And the linux box is also a thing i thought about. But the linux box will act as router now and i'm not to happy with servers behind a router. THere is always a service that will be affected etc.

You mean a point of failure?

If you mean a "service" like http/ftp/smtp, etc then don't worry.

I didn't mean you would run NAT or anything, still all real IPs, you would just be directing them over certain outbound interfaces.

-davidu

Are you distributing traffic for the same site between the servers, or is it multiple sites?

It's for multiple sites, multiple servers and multiple kinds of traffic(webservers, gameservers etc)

Then yes, you will either need a router to distribute the traffic, or you will need to reip your machines, so some are in one subnet (pointing to a gateway on the first uplink) and some are in another subnet (pointing to a gateway on the second uplink).

Out of curiousity: your provider does not offer you any options between 10 and 100 megs? Most data center providers will provision bandwidth between these two ranges.

If you like old fashion you can also use DNS round robin dns load balancing. Not the best but easy to implement and costs nothing (also doesn't guarantee 100% uptime, but will distribute load on multiple servers)....

Originally posted by apollo
If you like old fashion you can also use DNS round robin dns load balancing. Not the best but easy to implement and costs nothing (also doesn't guarantee 100% uptime, but will distribute load on multiple servers)....

Lmax is talking about distributing network traffic. DNS Round Robin would not apply here.