Routing question -- multiple gateway setup?

[James Knott]

William Park wrote:
> If you have multiple connections to Internet (say, PPP dialup, DSL, and
> Cable), how do you make use of all 3 ?  
> 
>     - Do you put 3 default entries in the routing table?  Like
> 	route add default gw 11.22.33.44
> 	route add default gw 55.66.77.88
> 	route add default gw 99.11.22.33
> 
>     - Is there some /proc/* parameter you set to "round robin" the
>       default gateway?
> 

You can only have 1 default gateway.  Using all 3 in the manner you 
suggest, is not practical.  If you had multiple connections to the same 
ISP, you might be able to arrange load balancing, but with three 
unrelated connections, there's no way to do that.  You might be able to 
determine which connection is best for a particular destination and 
routhe that way, but again, that's not practical without knowing about 
the routing between ISPs.  Just distributing the packets among the 3 
won't work, as with tcp, you need a "connection", which includes a 
consistent IP address on both ends.

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml