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There are ways in which you can come close to load-balancing for some types of traffic, but it's not without its problems either. I did this a couple of years ago with 2 IPCop boxes (I was on ISDN at the time, and having 2x 64k connections to separate ISPs was much cheaper than paying one ISP the premium to allow me to channel bond for 128k). First thing to note: IPCop has Squid built in, and Squid was an important part of how I set it up. Essentially one box (with the most reliable ISP) acted as DHCP and handed out all the gateway information specific to its connection. This prevented me from having to manually configure all the clients. The second IPCop box was set up without the DHCP server running, so its info was never handed to any clients, but it was on the same physical network segment. I then used another box, also running Squid, and configured it to use the 2 IPCop boxes as parent proxies. Clients then accessed the web via this third Squid box. This gave me pretty good load balancing for all HTTP traffic. I believe there are also SOCKS proxies that can do something similar, but whether those are freely available or not I don't know. One big problem with all this load balancing stuff, whether home-grown or with a proper hardware load balancer: some sites don't like seeing multiple connections from the same computer but from different IPs. This was particularly a problem with online banking sites - eventually I got to a point where I told squid to not load balance any HTTPS traffic. Seemed to solve the problem. If one had two connections of different speed, you could use the weight= setting in the cache_peer directives to divide connections accordingly between your connections. (In hindsight, the whole lot could be done without the third Squid box - choose one of the others to be the primary server, and tell it to only cache_peer for half of the connections). Regards, Chris -- C.M. Bagnall, Partner, Minotaur Tel: (07010) 710715 Mobile: (07811) 332969 ICQ: 13350579 AIM: MinotaurUK MSN: minotauruk at hotmail dot com Y!: Minotaur_Chris This email is made from 100% recycled electrons |