[Pc_Support] RE: Bonding 2xADSL or ADSL+cable?

[Bryan J. Smith <b.j.smith at ieee.org>]

From: Damien McKenna <dmckenna at thelimucompany.com>
> Out of interest, do you know if either Windows 2000 or Windows 2003 can
> do round robin, or are there any simple routers able to do this?

The NT5.x kernels are incapable of the routing magic of the Linux 2.4+ kernels.
Tony Aawtrey can tell you a lot of the limitations he saw first-hand when
the IEEE decided to move away from Windows, despite Microsoft personnally
putting their top people on it and stalling the switch for a good 6 months.

All because Microsoft finally had to admit that not even the NT5.1/2003 kernel
could handle various IP capabilities.

If you really can't use Linux, consider a Cisco 1700 series router for about $1,500.
It should be capable of doing what you want.

BTW, it would really help if I knew more about your setup, applications and,
most importantly, the direction the traffic is flying.  That last part is _everything_
to your considerations.

If it's all outbound, then maybe a single, 6MBps cable will give you 3x the performance.
If it's inbound, then 1.5Mbps SDSL will give you 3-4x the performance of ASDL.

If most of your inbound traffic is just a lot of e-mail or other services, considering
using different connections for different purposes.
E.g., SDSL for inbound services, cable for outbound LAN PC users.

And you could use Windows to handle such capabilities because no advanced Internet
routing trickery would be required.  At the most, maybe some internal LAN segmentation
might be optimal -- and Windows can serve out RIP/OSPF routing tables.



--
Bryan J. Smith   mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org