Old GNU Guy Needs Some Feed Back
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Hi Folks,
New comer to the forum so, little in intro. Name Charlie, 67 YO, Texas.
Recently wound up with two ISP, for reasons I'd rather not go into. ;-)
Be gentle with an old man. My first time in Rome so I may not be doing it, this forum, like the Romans want me to do it. I been Internet 'nd Usenet 'bout hunnert years, but first time in here. ;-)
But anyway, in order to make use of both ISP, I decided to build me a dual wan pfSense box and try it out. It's simply a stripped down AMD 3000+ generic box with pfSense installed to HD. Two linksys cards, dc1 and dc2 and onboard vr0.
dc1 is connected to my RoadRunner cable modem with dynamic IP and dc2 to my Clearwire Wireless Modem with static IP.
vr0 is set up for my lan with an IP of 192.168.2.1 DHCP enabled and a Linksys Router and Wireless Access point is connected to it which serves two dual boot Linux and Windows computers, a WD-Network Drive, Printer and a SKYPE GE telephone wireless base.
The Linksys router runs at IP of 192.168.1.1.
Everything seems to work fine and better than it was previously with only one WAN connection. Seemingly good throughput and it has pretty well carried every load I've put on it.
I basically have no idea as to what I'm doing or have done and don't even know if what I've got is working properly, could work better or should work better. I just followed the documentation provided as far as the Advanced BSD Dual Wan Router @ netlife.co.za and after a little tweaking, it all came up working or at least seeming to work.
Firewall and port scan on the pfSense Router shows stealth with all ports blocked from the bad guys out there on the WWW. I reckon all my NAT stuff is OK.
The generic bandwidth and speed meter tests available on WWW like Cnet, etc. show me running average of 1500 to 1800 Kbs, for what ever that is worth.
My interfaces show as follows. Can someone in the know give me feedback on it and if I need provide any other information to evaluate if I may have it right or not or as good as I can possibly get it with what I'm doing or working with.
TIA
CC
Status: Interfaces
WAN interface (dc1)
Status up
DHCP up
MAC address 00:18:f8:0b:ff:1a
IP address 70.122.92.197
Subnet mask 255.255.224.0
Gateway 70.122.64.1
ISP DNS servers
64.13.46.12
64.13.48.12
24.93.41.127
24.93.41.128
Media 100baseTX <full-duplex>In/out packets 1557848/98045 (144.12 MB/11.98 MB)
In/out errors 0/0
Collisions 0LAN interface (vr0)
Status up
MAC address 00:0e:a6:7b:85:69
IP address 192.168.2.1
Subnet mask 255.255.255.0
Media 100baseTX <full-duplex>In/out packets 57220/65877 (7.52 MB/53.32 MB)
In/out errors 0/0
Collisions 0Clearwire interface (dc0)
Status up
DHCP up
MAC address 00:04:5a:71:de:fa
IP address 96.24.16.106
Subnet mask 255.255.240.0
Gateway 96.24.16.1
Media 10baseT/UTP
In/out packets 262095/39246 (56.61 MB/2.48 MB)
In/out errors 0/0
Collisions 0</full-duplex></full-duplex> -
The generic bandwidth and speed meter tests available on WWW like Cnet, etc. show me running average of 1500 to 1800 Kbs, for what ever that is worth.
My interfaces show as follows. Can someone in the know give me feedback on it and if I need provide any other information to evaluate if I may have it right or not or as good as I can possibly get it with what I'm doing or working with.
pfSense's loadbalancer balances connections and not bandwith.
So to make use of the multiWAN you need to establish multiple connections.
I'm not sure how these speedtests work but i doubt that they connect to multiple servers at once.
Your best bet to test the actual speed is to use some kind of downloadmanager that is able to split a download into multiple connections.
These connections will be balanced over your two WAN'sThe balancer seems to work or your traffic counter wouldnt be at a few MB's on both WANs :)
Your hardware is "a bit" oversized ;)
You could take a look into embedded hardware like the alix2c3 http://pcengines.ch/alix2c3.htm -
pfSense's loadbalancer balances connections and not bandwith.
So to make use of the multiWAN you need to establish multiple connections.
I'm not sure how these speedtests work but i doubt that they connect to multiple servers at once.
Your best bet to test the actual speed is to use some kind of downloadmanager that is able to split a download into multiple connections.
These connections will be balanced over your two WAN'sThe balancer seems to work or your traffic counter wouldnt be at a few MB's on both WANs
Your hardware is "a bit" oversized
You could take a look into embedded hardware like the alix2c3 http://pcengines.ch/alix2c3.htmWell, currently, I have Ktorrent running on a Mandriva Machine pulling down SuSE 11 beta. I'm not sure how to go about, or if it's capable of splitting a down load as you suggest. What would you recommend as a DL manager that has that or those capabilities. The Ktorrent is ranging from around 200 KB/s to 800 or better KB/s with average of about 560 KB/s down and 50 KB/s more up with average of about 28 KB/s up. About 25 seeders and same on leechers. Estimated time left is about 2 hours on a 4.3 Gig .iso that I only started about 15 minutes ago. That's about the fastest torrent I've ever experienced from kernel.org. ????
That's only hardware I had in my closet and junk box at the time. ;-)
Thanks for the pointer and your quick response and attention.
Any other suggestions are welcomed.
PfSense has been fun so far. ;-)
Hope this formatted right. "Strangers in a foreign land strike a match with trembling hand. Learn too much to ever understand."
-Phil OchsCharlie
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Sounds like you're doing it right.
BitTorrent will definitely take advantage of multiple WAN connections.
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If you want to make full use of Bittorrent you also might want to forward the port from both WAN's to you Client.
–> Other clients can connect to you on both WANs.
