Adding Dual WAN

[Lee Sharp]

I can't believe this is me doing this... I am one of the most rabid
"Keep m0n0 lean!" guys out there.

But... I am getting more and more clients that need Dual WAN. I went
to PF sense, but it has some issues that I am having a hard time addressing.

1) It needs more hardware. Replacing 100 boxes is not fun...

2) It is missing that wonderful checkbox in the traffic shaper "Share
Bandwidth evenly on the LAN" so I have yet to get a working yet
completely fare system up.

So, would it be possible to add multi-wan with load share and failover
to m0n0wall without breaking the lean mean tiger we all know and love?
Or would it require an architecture change of unimaginable magnitude?

Lee

[Andrew White]

It might be more likely under freebsd 8 as it has support for multiple
default gateways afaik. It has been possible to do multiwan since
freebsd 5 at least, with ipfw and the fwd action , but with ipfw there
were cpu issues around nat not having great throughput. With ipfw
probability option, you could balance different size links somewhat
better than having dual default gateways.

So with freebsd 8, it may be possible with ipfilter, or with ipfw and
ipfilter for nat etc. Investigating this is a reasonable piece of
work.

If it works and is performant, there is the next step of coding it
which is a large piece of work from the UI down. The code in m0n0wall
has been built on the assumption of single wan and would need to be re
coded to handle >1 wan links. This type of change could bring a bunch
of bugs into m0n0wall and would probably be best handled with a fork.

Right now we aren't getting a huge amount of feedback of success or
failure of m0n0wall 1.8, so getting 1.8 closer to production is going
to take time, and this is what multiwan would be built on.

So, given that the two active contributors are afaik both giving the
max amount of time they can already to m0n0wall, I would figure many
months before multiwan was a beta feature ?

Thanks

Andrew

Post by Lee Sharp
I can't believe this is me doing this... I am one of the most rabid
"Keep m0n0 lean!" guys out there.
But... I am getting more and more clients that need Dual WAN. I went
to PF sense, but it has some issues that I am having a hard time addressing.
1) It needs more hardware. Replacing 100 boxes is not fun...
2) It is missing that wonderful checkbox in the traffic shaper "Share
Bandwidth evenly on the LAN" so I have yet to get a working yet
completely fare system up.
So, would it be possible to add multi-wan with load share and failover
to m0n0wall without breaking the lean mean tiger we all know and love?
Or would it require an architecture change of unimaginable magnitude?
Lee
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