Way to bond multiple modems?

Networking Networking Hardware
21

@DeusQain Qain, an ASR1001 with 2GBps license is $5k.

The Ent NICs you speak of offloads only the TCP checksum calculations from the CPU, they do not process the routing table, which is done by the CPU. Also, you do not need 8 or more GBs of RAM, unless you do BGP sessions with 1kk routes going in the routing table. Home routers usually have 1 default route, or more default routes, if you have two or more WAN connections.

This whole "home" PC-router is not only impractical from reliability standpoint, but it's also inferior from a bandwidth standpoint.

And, you should make a difference between an ASIC (that has express forwarding, rapid packet decapsulation and other features) and a router-processor, which is essentially the work horse for packets that need forwarding based on decisions regarding routing (Layer3) or upper layers (packet filtering, NAT, VPN etc.)

2GBps is no joke, and requires serious hardware. That means a lot more than 200$.

Also, you forget, that NAT severely lowers the router throughput, because now the packets need to be processed twice, and it's all done by the CPU. So, to get 2Gbps throughput with NAT corresponds to CPU power for approximately 4Gbps without NAT, and that also depends on how many flows have to be processed. A typical home PC with bittorrent generates 10-20k connections(flows). If you have 5 PCs, that's like 100k connections, that will crush a router-box even more.

But this is only in the sake of the discussion. If @KuramaKitsune wants to build a router PC, by all means, lets build it. I'm just saying that with hardware from the garage it won't do the things he thinks it should be able to.

22

lets take a list of items you think we will need then
but if the quote unquote 500 + megabit system only wants a "multi core cpu at at least 2ghz"
thats not reaaaaly asking for much

23

Sure, but the previous part of the same sentence states "server-grade CPU", which means lots of cache and whatnot ;)

Anyway, you are not going to need 500Mbps tomorrow, so you will see how your FX-4200 perform.

24

I think the FX-4200 will be fine. My pfsense box has a phenom II x4 with 4GB of ram and it has no trouble keeping up. I don't have the fastest internet but I run four VPNs, three snort instances, three gigabit networks (two of which use link aggregation) and it's able to route traffic at full speed between the networks without breaking a sweat. You really don't need anything that powerful for a home network. Even the newer atoms are almost good enough to do gigabit.

25

That's LAN traffic you are talking about. 1-2Gbps internet (NAT) traffic is a different task.

26

it will be a long time before i need to worry about that.

27

I'm aware of the difference. But I still think it will be fine. Now that it's using a multi threaded version of pf even an atom can do 1gbps, I don't see why a decent quad core couldn't do 2gbps.

28

actually it said, something like server grade hardware, ie, pci network cards

IF i remember correctly

Server class hardware With PCI-e network adapters hmm AND . Multiple cores at > 2.0GHz are required
if there not refering to th network adapters OR the cpu, then what, the power supply or the mobo?

29

i ended up looking like this.
the cable modem from gvc cable, and my modem/(belkin)wifirouter connected to the secondary gvc cable line
TO
the tplink load balance router
TO
a gigabit tp link switch which is all the desktops,
TO
a small wifi router

we ARE now pulling about 18-20 megabit to the desktops,
and the small wifi.
and the single cable speeed of 10 megabit to the belkin wifi
but im having issuses getting the lan to see the desktops from the wifi (ehter of the wifis),
i think i need to log into it and put it in bridge or transparent mode,
but i dont quite know if its a little box that can be logged into or not,
ive tried just taking 2 ethernet cables to it, from the switch, one to the wan one to a lan but the whole network really dont seem to like that, haha

30

How have you connected the wifi router? If you've connected the WAN port to the switch that will explain why you can't access the LAN.

31

rewind to my last post
2 modems, one of which is also a wifi
a load balancer
a switch
all the desktops
a second wifi

32

well im bored again,
if i were to add a second gigabit lan port (via usb 3.0 or add in card)

to each pc in the house,
how would i tell windows that it can now transfer files at 200MB/s ?
also, since everything is on the same gigabit switch,
would that switch be fast enough (i suppose if it had aggregation ?)

33

They would have to be on the same IP and Mac Address, which is difficult and usually only works in server-grade NICs. It's called Link Aggregation. So, you need special NICs, which probably on come in PCI/PCIe form and defientely need special drivers on Windows.

You are also limited by the HHD/SSD and CPU speed as well as the capacity of the protocol (SMB is kind of...meh...in my opinion).

34

It doesn't work that way. In Linux you can do that if the computers are connected directly to each other, but it's not very reliable. In normal use you need a managed switch and either Linux or a server grade network card which supports link aggregation. When you create a link aggregation each host can still only transfer at the speed of a single link, but now multiple hosts will have access to the aggregate bandwidth.

The reason you can get more than a single link speed is because network traffic can't be sent out of order, and therefore the protocol keeps traffic which is part of the same stream on the same NICs. It does this by calculating a hash of the source and destination IP addresses and use that has as an identifier for which nic to send the traffic over. Therefore no matter how many bonded links you have all the traffic between host a and host b will always only use one link. But if you have host a and host b accessing host c then they can have up to 2 Gbps total bandwidth.

35

In order to have the same two NICs with the same Mac Address and IP Address, you will need special server NICs. This can't be accomplished simply by software in Linux. The software only works if the hardware supports it. There might be specific protocols that take advantage of two separate NICs, but they have ti be managed separately.

36

I haven't tried with anything other than Intel nics but I heard that bonding in Linux wasn't dependant on the driver.

37

but getting through a switch requires support in the switch or some sort of magic vlan trickery

38

There are ways of doing it without support in the switch, but they only work for transmission I think.