Consumer-grade dual-homed connectivity options?

[jared at puck.nether.net (Jared Mauch)]

On Dec 30, 2009, at 10:49 AM, Paul Bennett wrote:

> Is it going to be a more-effective solution to drop a few bucks on the 2960 and go through the hassle of learning how to set it up (and then setting it up), or would I be better off putting a secured Linux distro (e.g. gentoo-hardened, or something) on the semi-spare PC and running the load-balancing via iproute2 and friends?

Back at the Toronto NANOG I bumped into someone who had an interesting solution to the multihoming problem.

What they had was a machine that would key/sequence the packets and send them out each connection (so if they had 2, it would send a copy out each).

Whichever got there first, was decapsulated and forwarded on.  Any duplicates/late packets were dropped.  This meant that they would always have the speed of the fastest link for either up or down.

They also had a method to load-share to bond the two (or more) links together.

It was some custom solution they built, but something I would like to see a link to or open-sourced.

- Jared