On 6/26/2007 12:44 PM, Peter Rabbitson wrote:
Can you elaborate on this? My only issue with the kernel route balancing is that route caching can not be disabled entirely, so traffic to the same site will leave via the same channel, regardless if the other channel is empty or not. I know that it is technically possible (kernel option CONFIG_IP_ROUTE_MULTIPATH_RANDOM), but it will work only for globally routable addresses, while breaking NAT badly.
This is a very good point that was not made in the referenced message. I do not have any rebuttal to this point. This is the type of point that I was hoping to see before but did not.
My response to this is that you have a good point, something that in my opinion should be addressed by the kernel at some point.
The reason I made my bold, as you call it, statement, is because 90% of the time when someone is doing NAT, it is for a tightly joined group, with similar interests - hence a lot of traffic duplication. For instance if every user listens to the same online radiostation - how would you work around it?
I don't know if the 90% as you say is accurate or not. However if you are even remotely in the ball park, you have a good point. I have been around environments with nearly 1000 computers with very little in similarity between all the people. I think this is really based on where NAT is used and how it is used. If you are talking of many to one NAT I would agree with you. However if you are talking about many to many NAT, I'll disagree with you.
I think that the scenarios you are thinking of would be best described as a small office / home office (a.k.a. SOHO), which would definitely qualify with what you are saying. However there are a LOT of uses of NAT outside of SOHOs. Given the prevalence of SOHOs doing NAT, I am willing to bet that you are correct. But, this is why there are different types of solutions to this problem for them.
Let me know your thoughts
With regard to streaming radio, I personally believe that it should be multicast so that it can be streamed in one time and have multiple recipients hear it. Or there should be some sort of proxy that will download it and pass it back to multiple clients. Of course, this is beyond the scope of this discussion and would be used in larger environments out side of the SOHOs that I think you are referring to.
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