From: Andrew Moriarty (amgroupstudy@hotmail.com)
Date: Wed Jan 07 2004 - 02:53:20 GMT-3
Ever have the feeling that you are missing something incredibly basic that
will make you look stupid later? I do right now, and I hope someone can
help.
The scenario: The customers CEO often works from home. He accesess company
servers in california, and he lives in Canada. Because of where he lives,
all he can get at his house is a relatively basic DSL from one provider, and
a basic cable modem setup from another. Both of these are "Home user" type
setups, with addresess assigned by DHCP. The DSL provider is frequently down
for a day or more. Problem is, thats the high speed connection! The cable in
this area is much slower, and not much more reliable. (Don't ask me to
explain why this so- it just is!- and before anyone makes any canada jokes,
yes he can get a canoe at the local supermarket, all the TV netoworks carry
hockey, and yes, there are wild elk running around in the parking lot)
The CEO has a relatively robust home network- a unix based firewall, and a
half dozen computers behind it.
His goal is to have seemless fail-over, for as cheap as possilbe. He wants
to be connected in to a contact management system all day long, and not
worry about which ISP is up or down. In other words, he might buy a router
or two, but he won't upgrade his personal "Home" service to a business class
service. (its not available in that area anyways)
Each ISP provides him with a public IP address. Right now he only uses one
of them, and uses NAT on his unix firewall to provide internet access for
his six machines. He wants to add the second ISP to the configuration, to
povide fault tolerance.
I've suggested buying a router and connecting it to both ISP's, and using
one interface as the primary and one as the backup, with static routes and
NAT.Cheap, simple solution. Problem is, if one ISP fails, there goes his
public address that the NAT is using, and he'll have to log out of his
contact managment software, and restart his session, potentially loosing
data. He does NOT want to do that. Its no good flipping over to the second
ISP/NAT connection, because then his public address will change, and his
session will be invalid and have to start again.
He doesn't have any public ip addresses inside his house, can't get any
either with the services on offer in that area. He's not going to do
anything complex like run BGP etc. The ISP's won't let him anyways.
I'm not sure I can solve his problem, but I've got a tickle in the back of
my mind about something, thinkingI saw this somewhere before. I even got out
my Halabi and Doyle books and re-read some stuff.
Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do here? Or even something to
research.....
am
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Mon Feb 02 2004 - 09:07:37 GMT-3