Firebrick for the bonded upload on ADSL

This sounds very interesting, and i am keen to learn more. Has anyone had
any experience with it? Does it work well?

I am not so sure on the failover aspect of it, because if we buy it from A&A
and they go down, or BT goes down, then where is the failover? To date, our
router has never had a problem but we experience the usual issues with external
parties.

Very interested in the bonded uplink. Which Firebrick product does this?

any information you can give me, much appreciated.

thanks

a

(no personal experiance or firebrick)

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8
&safe=off&th=e49e419df0d90801&rnum=6

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8
&safe=off&th=ee2168ce046818c5&rnum=1

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
&safe=off&th=a2d836b76620aa7a&rnum=1

I think it's only the FB Plus that does it.

--
Alex

The SoHo does now as well (latest beta) but does not have the monitoring
and fallback which most people would also want. For home use you can
live without it (i.e. manual reconfig on fault) hence bonding now being
in the SoHo model.

- --
~ _ Rev. Adrian Kennard, Andrews & Arnold Ltd / AAISP
~ (_) _| _ . _ _ ADSL, fixed IP, monthly contract http://adsl.ms/
~ ( )(_|( |(_|| ) New Splicecom VOIP telephone system http://aa.nu/
~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Need a good firewall: http://www.FireBrick.info/

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Any news of a rental price for the FireBrick? (or will there be a new
product range with rental of the FB included?) =)

Not really decided yet, sorry.

--

( )(_|( |(_|| ) SpliceCom VoIP based PABXs http://aa.nu/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Bond two ADSL lines? http://www.FireBrick.info/

interesting ... but ... what is the point of fallback when both ADSL
lines are coming from BT/AAisp? If one goes down, then both of them
will go down, so we aren't really benifiting from a more reliable
connection. Correct?

What does the monitoring do?

Obviously if A&A fall down, yes. However, usually BT goes down in parts,
and rather more often than A&A.

So the idea is to have one Office ADSL with 20:1 contention, and one Home
ADSL with 50:1 contention, which means they start off by going through
different bits of BT, and then ask A&A to route your Home ADSL 50:1
connection through the smaller 34Mbps pipe from BT, again keeping it on
different BT equipment.

Given that A&A doesn't appear to loose core routing all that often, and if
you're smarthosting mail and have a DNS cache and running the above (through
a firebrick), I gather that in real terms people have been experiencing a
pretty darned reliable service (more reliable than a leased line etc.)

--
Julie Brandon http://www.computergeeks.co.uk/
_______________________________________________________________________________

The FireBrick has 'profiles' and a profile can be a ping. The FireBrick
can ping an address through a particular gateway and therefore knows
which ADSL lines are up. Other things in the FireBrick, such as routing,
can be based on wether the ping profile is up or down. Therefore the
routing can change automaticly depending on which lines are up or down.
It can also email you when the profile switches over.

Apart from being used in ADSL/Bonding fallback, it can be used to
fallback to an ISDN router if the ADSL drops, for example. Indeed, you
can have a few bonded ADSL lines, and still fall back to an ISDN router
if there is a massive ADSL problem - all automaticly!

(Profiles can also be based on time)

--
Andrew Hearn, BSc...
Andrews & Arnold Ltd

Not normally, no.

The backup line will normally be a Home 500 circuit - 50:1 instead of 20:1
on Office 500/1000/2000 which means it's differently provisioned than the
main circuit.

Often when there are faults, only one side of the exchange is affected,
either the 20:1 or 50:1 side - this means that in the event of a fault you
have a slower alternate route - but you still have connectivity...

--
Paul Cummins - Always a NetHead
Wasting bandwidth since 1981

Begin Once upon a time there was a badly broken newsreader...

Correct, at least in my experience. We have this setup at work.

This has been our experience of the situation. We've had a couple of
times now when the primary circuit has failed (20:1 contention) inside
BT, and the backup circuit (50:1 contention) has been available, so I
can offer a concrete example of this provision working.

Coupled with a firebrick to do the profiling of the 2 outbound pipes,
and making a decision to route to the backup if the primary fails has
kept our internet connection going through BT failures without the MD
noticing.

Regards

Dave Jolley.

Just to add - the normal "backup 500" service we offer for people who
want the second line, and which provides extra uplink bandwidth all the
time if you use something like a firebrick is routed as diversely as
possible. i.e.

1. Two separate phone lines, obviously.
2. 50:1 and 20:1 so different DSLAM kit or shelves
3. 50:1 and 20:1 so different VPs over BT's ATM network
4. Different POP (Ilford and Ealing)
5. Different Fibres from difference exchanges in SDH to our racks
6. Different Racks using different power strips and fuses, etc
7. Finally in to our network where we have dual routers and dual
switches and dual transit fibres.

It is as much the same as using two ISPs as possible whilst retaining
the same IPs.

--
Rev Adrian Kennard
Andrews & Arnold Ltd

Where I used to work, we had some 64K BT leased lines run for years without
any faults. Some other providers weren't as good though!

J

--
My other computer also runs NetBSD
http://www.netbsd.org/