combining 2 cable modems

prolific · Apprentice Joined: 19 Apr 2002 Posts: 237

i have 2 cable modems connected to two different nics .. eth0 & eth 1 .. right now both nics have their own IP's via DHCP, but I can only use one connection at a time .. is there a way to bind the 2 connections together so that I can double my download speed ?

neuron · Advocate Joined: 28 May 2002 Posts: 2371

not unless both your isp and your network cards have hardware support as far as I know.

BUT, you can do some tricks to use them both, for example some ftp servers supports serving files on different ip's, it won't increase the speed of a single transfer, but it will increase your speed if you have multiple people downloading.

some download managers should be able to split downloaded files in half and download one from each servers.

should be very easy to get bittorrent setup for downloading with both connections in theory, might be harder in practice (also some trackers might not like you if you set it up like that). You could ofcourse have one bittorrent client on each ip, and have them prioritize eachother, ie seed to eachother before anyone else (some clients have support for prioritizing lan traffic).

thehailo · n00b Joined: 11 Mar 2004 Posts: 47 Location: US

Honestly I spent a while trying to find an open source solution to perform load balancing and couldn't find anything. Besides specific hacks (like mentioned above), it doesn't look good. I eventually just crapped out and asked my boss to provide a SonicWALL that does basic outbound preempting/load balancing. It's not a great solution and far from cheap - $1,000 easy. It's cheaper than dedicated load balancing equipment though.

Even then they wouldn't act as one. Unless you get your ISP to bind them (never seen anyone willing to do it for a residential customer) you won't get them to act as one.

arpunk · n00b Joined: 13 Jun 2006 Posts: 61 Location: Colombia

bugg_tb · Posted: Sat Jan 06, 2007 10:21 pm Post subject:

Dont' know if it helps but you could check out, http://www.linux.com.lb/wiki/index.pl?node=Load%20Balancing%20Across%20Multiple%20Links

I have seen it done when I was working on a community broadband project but only on a specially created linux distro
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vibrokatana · Guru Joined: 09 Feb 2006 Posts: 328 Location: o0o0oo

I wonder if bonding might work...

load balancing is in the kernel IIRC. virtually any distro should beable to handle it.
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