Two connections at the same time.

[therecka]

I heard that you can use Two connections at the same time but which program do i need?

Have a DSL 2,5mbit and a Cable 1mbit

[Charles Wirth]

You would need 2 network cards and windows NT/2000/XP (never tried in 95/98/me)

Load balancing is one way and the other is to bridge the network adapters in windows XP.

In your network control panel you can highlight the 2 network adapters and "bridge connection"

Another option would be to use one adapter to answer HTTP and FTP requests (example) and the other for gaming as your main connection.

[IFMU]

Is that what that bridging is for? LoL

Im not to sure what help it would be if you were still only .... er wait ok now I re-read and see you have DSL and Cable... ah makes a lil more sense now... heh.

Interesting idea, wish I had the money to do something like that.
Luck and let us know how it goes for yea!

[routehero]

You can always look in to getting a Nexland ISB Pro800 Turbo. It is a affordable load-balancing router which supports IPSEC and has a builtin 8 port switch.

I've used this device and continue to use it and it is quite good. Sometimes it is a bit flaky and does flapping (akin to BGP flapping) but that is fixed with a reboot.

[Smizack]

There are a few routers out there that will accpet 2 cable modems/DSL.

[BalefireX]

how would you do load balancing? what does that mean? and can you do bridging in win2k? does bridging mean that it shares both connections (essentially doubling bandwith?)

[Smizack]

The router should load balance automatically. And that just means that both modems would be moving close to the same ammount of bandwith rather than one doing, say 90% of the work, and the other only the ramaining 10%. Get it?

I'm not positive about bridging in Win2k, but I know you can with XP.

[therecka]

I tried to make a bridge in winxp but it wont work for me. When I bridge the connection they will not work. the IP from one of the connection disappears and the other is still the same but nothing happends.

How do I balance the load in WinXP ?

[MeetHell]

Hi i am having the same problem ..
I do have two modem's (pay for two)
This is the spec.
Modem 1 has 8590kps down and 720kps up.
Modem 2 has 6200kps down and 350kps up..and for $10 bucks more will be like modem 1...
I did the same thing with bridge in win/xp on a server with two net cards on the MB...Did not work.It only uesed one modem....
The server is a Dual xeon 2.4 dual core 2gig ram 5 36g 10krpm computer and I run Meet Hell for Doom 3 and would like to get the server to Load Balanc the modem's
Thank's MeetHell...

[__Miguel_]

As far as my limited network knowledge goes, NIC bridging is bound not to work. When Windows bridges two NICs, it treats them as if they were only one concerning the IP address. That's why you only get one IP after bridging...

What you need is some kind of "outgoing round robin". Round robin, for those not fluent in "Networkese", is something used especially with Web servers: you have a bunch of them recieving requests (for the same site), but the DNS server makes sure each request is directed to a different server at a time. Outgoing round robin should, at least theoretically, send outgoing Internet requests one connection at a time.

I don't think, however, outgoing round robin is even standard in TCP/IP, which is why it's usually required to use special routers to do that. However, it might be "feasible" under Windows. Keep in mind this is just my TCP/IP knowledge working here, that I haven't tried it, that I can't try it (only 1x ADSL for me) and, more importantly, that it just might mess your TCP settings and you'd have NO Internet connection until it's back as it was.

Ok, enough with the disclaimer :p:. TCP/IP relies on routes. So, if you have more than one route pointing to 0.0.0.0 (the Internet), you might just trick Windows into thinking "hey, two routes. Nice! Gain way, everyone, here I go, twice!" :lol: The thing is, there is one thing called "default route" (which is, you guessed it, the first route Windows will use when accessing some place it doesn't know). You can try using two 0.0.0.0 routes with the same metric (1) and not configuring a default gateway, but it's not certain you'll get outgoing round robin. Even if you're using W2K3's RRAS, most likely is that you'll get 1) no connection or 2) failover connection only.

Another way to get around this would be to ignore the 0.0.0.0 route (it's the last one used, always) and to create two differente "Internet zones". Some IPs would be accessed through one connection, the rest through the other. It might work, but depending on your Internet traffic pattern, you could have 100%-0% usage...

One thing for sure, thoughput enhancement is not likely to happen in single downloads (one request, one connection).

If any of you tries any of this, drop me a line, I'd like to hear about it.

Cheers.

Miguel

[MadHawk]

I found following link: Load balance two Internet connections for Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000 and XP. (http://www.geekswhoknows.com/articles/load-balance-two-internet-connections.htm)

I think this could be useful. ;)

[rogard]

Just install two network adapters the use this registry tweak:

**********************************************
RandomAdapter
Key: Netbt\Parameters
Value Type: REG_DWORD - Boolean
Valid Range: 0 or 1 (False or True)
Default: 0 (False)
Description: This parameter applies to a multihomed host only. If it is set to 1 (True), NetBT will randomly select the IP address to put in a name query response from all its bound interfaces. Frequently, the response contains the address of the interface that the query arrived on. This feature would be used by a server with two interfaces on the same network for load balancing.

************************************************** ******


Got from here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314053


True load balancing is not really possible in your situation, but with the above it will help a little.



FYI bridging will not work as you are bridging layer 2 and tcpip load balancing has to work at layer 3 in this situation.
In fact it may leave you with no internet access at all :)

[yonton228]

Nice zombie thread :D




-yonton228/timmy