On Thu, 2003-02-20 at 14:24, Brad Davidson wrote: > William L. Thomson Jr. said: > > > Yes, but not in sense that traffic comes in one interface and goes out > > another. From my understanding the main benefit of the SysMaster > > solution was the number of connections being balanced had nothing to do > > with the number of interfaces. > > ... so it would go in and then come out again on the same interface? > > I'm sure it's great as far as ease of configuration, but to tell the truth > I'd rather plug in an extra cable or two, and not halve my available > bandwidth by doubling the per-link traffic. > > I guess it's a very targeted product, I just think it sounds rather silly. I'm guessing it has two interfaces. Hence the sentence: > > Yes, but not in sense that traffic comes in one interface and goes out The one interface connects to the local lan. The other connects to a network that can route to all of your upstream providers. This way the load balancer doesn't charge you per physical interface. It's no harder to load balance 2 way then 4 way, but a lot of network equipment makers would charge you twice as much because there are twice as many interfaces (or would charge you a significant amount more to have 4 interfaces). I'm guessing this is a pretty smart option assuming the aggregate traffic leaving you network is less then 100Mbit/s. If it's more then 100Mbit/s, you can afford better equipment. This does have some latency and security issues, but would seem like a reasonable idea for a lot of small networks that want to split out traffic down two providers. If I was a window's admin, and didn't know enought about Linux, I'd think that was one really cool piece of equipment... *grin*. Thanks, Kirby
