Another noob question
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I still haven't assembled our pfSense box yet, but as I'm thinking about possible routes to take for configuring it, I was curious about something. We have 5 static IP addresses from our ISP. Our cable modem has 4 network ports on it so we can connect multiple devices/networks to it. Would it do me any good to put an additional NIC in the server and configure two WAN IP's for load balancing? I don't know if we have to share all of the bandwidth between the IP's or if we actually get our 30M per IP (I'm going to guess they have to share).
I thought it might come in handy when I have to run a UDP download program to download some large files a couple of times a month and being UDP it does a terrific job of sucking up our bandwidth. I thought if I could hog the bandwidth pfSense would route other traffic out the other connection since some jackhole (IE: me) is sucking up the bandwidth and everyone starts whining. :)
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To have an additional NIC is never a bad idea. As for traffic shaping, I recommend this video. But first you have to check whether your ISP uses the same gateway address for all 5 connections. If your ISP shares the bandwidth across all 5 connections, then I would rather let pfSense do the traffic shaping instead of using routes and multiple connections (as described in the video).