> Oh, *that* kind of load balancing.  I thought you meant *outbound* load
> balancing, which is a recurring request here.

Ahh .... I get what you were thinking ... sorry I thought I made it
pretty clear but there is always room for interpretation :-)

Though that kind of connection load balancing would be cool now that you
mention it to though and you could configure an optional interface as a
second wan port!

> If the data passes through the program, even unmodified, it's a proxy.  
> The page you linked to calls it a proxy.  Even in concept, this requires
> converting the data from packets to a stream and back to packets.  Doing
> this entirely in the kernel wouldn't be cheap, and doing it in userland
> adds context-switching overhead and additional copying.  Applying this to
> most traffic on a modest-performing machine that's also the firewall and
> NAT router could create a bottleneck.

This is the one that I was actually trying. It appears to just bounce
(read as port forwarding) a connection rather than answer and proxy
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pythondirector/ At least that's what the
docs I was reading suggested.

For all intents and purposes it looks like it's just doing intelligent
port forwarding based on a couple of different algorithyms.

The problem is that adding python and associated stuff would end up
being way to much


> A more efficient method would be with "smart NAT", but I don't think
> that's possible without kernel support, even if the actual decisions are
> made in userland.  An API for "userland-controlled NAT" would have a
> number of uses, though.

Amen Brother!

> 
> > > Not to mention being pretty useless without multiple WAN interfaces. :-)
> > 
> > Are you on crack ... why would load balancing be useless without
> > multiple wan interfaces? If your sole purpose for doing this was high
> 
> Misunderstanding.  See above.

Sorry I wasn't trying to offend I was just a little confused byt the
question.