Draytek 3300 and Multiple ADSL

[Richie1972]

Continuing on with the task of providing the school with a half decent (and fully controlled by us) internet solution, I'm now looking into upgrading our existing 1MB ADSL with Zen to 8mb (they tell us it might only be around 4.5mb, but I reckon it could be more).
I'm also considering someone like www.bethere.co.uk to provide a second link (ADSL2+ at "up to" 24mb) - by using two separate ISPs I'm hoping that any problems don't take out our web access completely.
I've found that a Draytek 3300V could offer what I'm looking for (http://www.draytek.co.uk/products/vigor3300v.html) and was wondering if anyone has any experience of them, plus whether I'd need to have two identical ADSL connections, or whether different speed/suppliers would work.
Just built my first Ubuntu Linux box with Squid and DansGuardian for the content filtering side of things - once tested we could then be pulling the plug on our websense!!!

[Ric_]

AFAIK ADSL-bonding (which would combine the connections to produce a 'fatter pipe') requires a special config at the ISP and only certain ISPs offer this. The Draytek box you mention doesn't seem to support this either.

If all you want is load balancing, the Draytek info seems to suggest that you can have different speed lines on each 'WAN port' and prioritise the traffic to each - I'm not sure how it would do this if all the traffic is coming from one IP (as it appears to use IP-based lists).

[Richie1972]

There are, I believe, few ISPs offering bonded ADSL and it seems to also be less than reliable.
Splitting the load between two - or more - providers would offer the school an "apparently" faster internet, as they won't "clog" it up so quickly.
If it only uses IP based lists then,yes, it would be a bit limited - that's why I'm hoping someone on here might have used one of these 3300's

[Ric_]

Another note about reliability.... it seems to me that the loss of connection is more likely to be between you and the ISP (e.g. your exchange) than the ISP disappearing. Since all the lines would follow the same route a problem on one would probably mean a problem on the other.

A cable connection or microwave link would probably better suit the need. Do you not have a RBC that you can join?

[tom_newton]

@Ric - we find that our 3 ISPs tend to go down at different times - when the problem is between us and the exchange, its usually just one of the pairs. The biggest outage was when our voice lines went down - they're fibre and that was one out all out!

@Richie - bonding is, like some have said, a tricky business. There are a couple of ways to do it: Routing protocols like BGP et al are the "best" way, but these require your ISPs to be complicit, and are a dark art. Most ISPs will not help you with this!
Second way is MLPP based dsl bonding. again, you need 2 lines from 1 ISP and they need to support this, as does your router. Never done it so dunno about reliability. It provides LESS resilience than just 1 normal adsl line.
Final way is to simply have 2 connections and split traffic. Traffic can often be split by type (port) IP or round-robin by session. Session RR is the most "fair" but some websites (eg. online banking) can have issues.

Finally, would suggest that even if you can only get a couple of meg out of 8Mbit dsl lines you will get a good chunk more out of ADSL2+ like Be. We went from bulldog (argh) at nominal 8Mbit running at 2.notmuch because of the distance from Armley Exchange. Be 24Mbit(admittedly on a different pair) runs at closer to 7Mbit.

[Richie1972]

We do have an RBC (Blackburn with Darwen), but it is very restrictive, not brilliantly reliable and doesn't give us the control we want.
We're trying to distance ourselves as much as possible from our county provider - we're going our own way with regards to anti-virus, web filtering, etc.

[Geoff]

Blackburn? Isn't that under the Lancs BSF scheme?

[Richie1972]

No, Blackburn with Darwen is a Unitary authority and has no links to Lancs BSF. Blackburn is effectively Capita, hence why we are distancing ourselves from them lol
We are also a voluntary aided school, so BSF won't have as much power over us as some other areas.

[Geoff]

Oh ok, thanks for clarifying that. I suspect I was confusing Blackburn with Burnley.

[Richie1972]

Burnley, I believe, has had no end of trouble with BSF

[john]

Burnley + BSF = not good I believe, Chris may know more details as hes from Colne area so will probably hear things down the way from Burnley, into Brierfield then Nelson and then finally into Colne

[barryphillips]

Continuing on with the task of providing the school with a half decent (and fully controlled by us) internet solution, I'm now looking into upgrading our existing 1MB ADSL with Zen to 8mb (they tell us it might only be around 4.5mb, but I reckon it could be more).
I'm also considering someone like www.bethere.co.uk to provide a second link (ADSL2+ at "up to" 24mb) - by using two separate ISPs I'm hoping that any problems don't take out our web access completely.
I've found that a Draytek 3300V could offer what I'm looking for (DrayTek Vigor 3300V Firewall) and was wondering if anyone has any experience of them, plus whether I'd need to have two identical ADSL connections, or whether different speed/suppliers would work.
Just built my first Ubuntu Linux box with Squid and DansGuardian for the content filtering side of things - once tested we could then be pulling the plug on our websense!!!

I have experience with the Vigor 3300v (we are a Draytek Enterprise Partner).
You do not need identical ADSL connections to use load balancing. You must tell each WAN port on the 3300v what its ADSL bandwith is. Using the Draytek Vigor100 modems is advisable.

You should also consider the Vigor 5510 - Similar to 3300v but is a UTM product.

If you need any assistance, please do not hesitate to ask.

You

[barryphillips]

Continuing on with the task of providing the school with a half decent (and fully controlled by us) internet solution, I'm now looking into upgrading our existing 1MB ADSL with Zen to 8mb (they tell us it might only be around 4.5mb, but I reckon it could be more).
I'm also considering someone like www.bethere.co.uk to provide a second link (ADSL2+ at "up to" 24mb) - by using two separate ISPs I'm hoping that any problems don't take out our web access completely.
I've found that a Draytek 3300V could offer what I'm looking for (DrayTek Vigor 3300V Firewall) and was wondering if anyone has any experience of them, plus whether I'd need to have two identical ADSL connections, or whether different speed/suppliers would work.
Just built my first Ubuntu Linux box with Squid and DansGuardian for the content filtering side of things - once tested we could then be pulling the plug on our websense!!!

PS: You should also checkout: Upstream Internet - Bonded ADSL Linux Boot CD Image

[torledo]

@Ric - we find that our 3 ISPs tend to go down at different times - when the problem is between us and the exchange, its usually just one of the pairs. The biggest outage was when our voice lines went down - they're fibre and that was one out all out!

@Richie - bonding is, like some have said, a tricky business. There are a couple of ways to do it: Routing protocols like BGP et al are the "best" way, but these require your ISPs to be complicit, and are a dark art. Most ISPs will not help you with this!
Second way is MLPP based dsl bonding. again, you need 2 lines from 1 ISP and they need to support this, as does your router. Never done it so dunno about reliability. It provides LESS resilience than just 1 normal adsl line.
Final way is to simply have 2 connections and split traffic. Traffic can often be split by type (port) IP or round-robin by session. Session RR is the most "fair" but some websites (eg. online banking) can have issues.

Finally, would suggest that even if you can only get a couple of meg out of 8Mbit dsl lines you will get a good chunk more out of ADSL2+ like Be. We went from bulldog (argh) at nominal 8Mbit running at 2.notmuch because of the distance from Armley Exchange. Be 24Mbit(admittedly on a different pair) runs at closer to 7Mbit.

Tom is right about BGP, it's off limits for multihomed dsl connections. Multihomed leased lines and you'd have a better chance of getting an AS number, but as Tom has said you really do need to know what you're doing and you'd need a couple of fairly expensive routers with a decent amount of RAM. Nothing less than a Cisco 3800 or equivalent so i'm told.

One way of doing what you need is to look at products such as Radwares Linkproof and Linkproof branch which are designed specifically for this purpose. Unfortunately Linkproof is an expensive product for something that can be done for nothing, although as a dedicated product Linkproof would take some of the pain and headache out of setting up a multihomed loadbalanced solution.

You really don't need a bonded solution, it's a solution that was attractive a few years ago when broadband connections maxed at 2meg, but with ADSL2+ the fatness of the pipe is not really an issue any more. It's more about distribution of load and the all important fault tolerance. Bonded ADSL provides no service provider fault tolerance. Go with seperate providers, use one of the diy solutions and you won't have to bang you're head against a wall trying to get them to work together, that's even if they'd consider it in the first place.

[uk101man]

I'm currently working for a Company that provides ADSL and DSL and we had a request for ADSL bonding but when I looked into it I found out that BT wholsale (The people who simply the DSL network) have stopped doing bonding and was advise it could be done with two adsl lines at the client site, the router will need to do load balancing......of course I may be wrong/mistaken as i've just knocked my head and have a trickle of blood running down the side of my head ;-)