Multiple Gateways

[achedgy]

Hi,

Got a small village primary with a ridiculously slow adsl connection, 1.5mb a lot of the time. As soon as a few ipads or laptops start looking at things, it grinds to a halt, this is becoming more and more of an issue for the head and admin officer as it's stopping them from working at times. They're having to try to do anything web related in the evening after the kids have gone. Anyway, they've asked if they could have a second connection put it, just for them. So could I get BT to put a new line in, another router, and set the default gateway for these two PC's to that router? Am I being stupid, any reason why that wouldn't work. I know that connection isn't going to be filtered, kids users can't change IP, staff don't have know how to change IP settings, so I see the risk of anyone being able to get onto the connection as essentially nil.. Obviously they don't want to lose access to the server, copier etc, so do need to stay on the same network. Also we don't want to put any real money into this, configuration change etc, as the village is due to get fibre in about 18 months time (apparently)

Thanks

[chazzy2501]

I can't find ADSL multiplexers but this device DrayTek Vigor 2830n Triple-WAN VPN ADSL 2+ WiFi Router w/ Load Balancing & 3G Support (300Mbps N) can do adsl,3g and cable... The cable is a Ethernet connection so you could plug the other existing adsl into this. it allows for all three to work at the same time.

[SHimmer45]

if possible I would be looking at upgrading the current line if possible through your ISP, do you have an internal proxy as using one of these you can set bandwith limitations for client devices which should stop one or two devices hogging your limited bandwidth.

something like a pfsense of a smoothwall express box can be run on the most limited hardware so if you have something knocking about it can be pressed into service without any extra cost

[SchoolsBroadband]

Yes the Drayteks can do load balancing and will be perfect for what you need. You can force certain traffic destinations down different lines (i.e LA server connections down the LA link and only that way but balance other general traffic)

 

If you have a current LA connection then you won't want to perform NAT on that interface as that'll probably screw things up. I think you can do routed on one interface and then NAT on the other.

 

I have about 200 refurb Drayteks in stock as we've ripped them out following a move of our company to cloud based filtering and us using a different onsite router to do VPLS. Let me know if you want a good price on some refurb kit

 

Thanks

 

Dave

[achedgy]

Hi,

Upgrading the speed isn't really an option for us at the moment (problem of being a 'very' rural primary) we don't have an internal proxy, and with only 1.5Mb to play with i'm not sure we'd really be able to prioritise enough bandwidth to allow admin to have guaranteed access and keep curriculum working. Don't want to go down the load balancing route as we don't ever want curriculum using the 2nd connection (as it's unfiltered) We purely want curriculum using the SWGfL filtered connection using their router and admin going to the unfiltered connection.

[crc-ict]

When we were switching from County broadband to a third party provider, we did exactly as you were proposing. Our new connection and the WAN were both connected to the LAN, with all devices using the new connection router IP as default gateway and the bursar's PC using the WAN router IP as gateway so he could still do FMS exchanges with County. Worked fine.

 

Only thing you need to make sure is that both routers face the LAN with IP addresses within the same range. (for example, we had 172.xx.x.1 and 172.xx.x.2 as the two gateways).

[achedgy]

Thanks, that's what I was hoping to hear!