I am not sure load balancing should be carried out by a firewall. Would it not
be better to have a dedicated firewall(S) for each connection.

Automatic failover, however, would be good. Failover itself would be fairly
trivial to add unless you expected state to be kept. It would be a bit more
work to automatically update the configuration of the backup firewall as the
primary firewall was changed. It would be a much larger job to failover keeping
state.

Alex.

Quoting Andrew Lewis <andrew at coastal dot com>:

>
>
> Mitch (WebCob) wrote:
> > Hi Andrew - Haven't heard of any more work... though a bunch of us are
> > pondering solutions...
>
> I certainly wouldn't mind being a test site.
>
> > If you have ideas on HOW those other two work - share please.
>
> There seem to be two parts:  the load balancing and the failover.
>
> The load balancing seems to monitor the NAT and firewall state tables to
> determine which ethernet interface gets the new connection.  (Connection
> being a new NAT/PAT table entry).  The determination of which interface
> to use is based on whatever the user defines.  Things like:
>
> -Traffic spill over:  One link is saturated, use the other
> -Connection percentage:  One link gets 80% of all connections
> -Plain failover: if one is down, use the other
>
> The failover mechanism does periodic simple PING or TCP connects on
> remote hosts to determine if the ISP is up.
>
> Unfortunately I'm not familiar enough with the firewall and routing
> mechanisms in m0n0wall to even speculate on how to implement it.
>
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