I’m currently in a personal project in implementing network load balancing in Mac OSX, in my google-investigation I couldn’t find any native solutions, anybody had tried something like this?
I was starting to think about porting some solutions of freebsd, but I don’t think I had enough knowledge to do this, as a matter of fact, I don’t even know how they do it in freeBSD.
I’m starting to investigate pfsense, I think its a good candidate for 2 reasons, 1. it’s based in freeBSD (like Mac OS X), and 2. I’m a former user, and I think its very stable and functional, you should consider it if you need a gateway.
What do you think, Anybody had tried this? Anybody interested? any ideas ?
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I think this would be great. when you say load balancing what do you mean?
i would like to use two separate wifi networks each with its own internet connection then utilize them both on my mac, ie. so i can download one huge file from both at the same time.
is this what you mean?
thats exactly what I mean, I have a DSL and a 3G network and I want load balancing, I read about it, and while it cannot be achieved in a pure way (because you need ISP cooperation), I found and app (haven’t used) but I said can do load balancing but in a way that if a connection is busy it gets the other connection, maybe using a download accelerator we can achieve our purpose.
This is the app I found
http://sustworks.com/site/prod_ipnrx_overview.html
I will post it if I make it work…
thank you for your comments
I’m intrigued – any luck?
Not yet :S, I have a hard time in work so I don’t have time for my experiments, but I hope in 2 weeks this will change
I´m try to do more or less the same stuff.
I have 2 wifi access point in my house (2 differents networks)
1 for download stuff (torrents)
1 for surf the web
But the one that i use for surf the web must of the time (mornigs) nonboy use it,
so i was wondering if i can add :
Load balance wifi to permit my Macmini to access both networs at the same time
and i can download more
Please keep post any new ideas.
Thanks
Hi…
I believe you are all referring to “Internet Load Sharing”, not “Load Balancing”. Load Balancing is for incoming traffic to be routed to the least busy server on a LAN/VPN. For example, say you’re eBay, or Amazon (or just Joe Schmoe doing some P2P filesharing with a lot of data, and a huge internet connection, perhaps an OC3, of course we’re taking into consideration that you have tons of money to get such a connection, but that’s irrelevant)… What load balancing does, is when you have many clients from the internet, or intranet trying to access data that is in a specific site, the network load balancing system will route the traffic to the server with the least “LOAD” or least amount of process “percentage” available at the time the request is made.
What this means for you and your “customers”, is a quicker response from your servers.
With “Load Sharing”, you are using 2 internet connections to upload/download from the outside. Now, this is a complicated process due to DNS issues with IPv4/IPv6 routing. You see, when you make a request to say apple.com, Apple’s servers will get an IP registered for the session. The reply will be sent to that original IP. In order to be able to get the reply sent to your least used connection (and by this I mean the connection with the highest amount of bandwidth available at the time), Apple’s servers need to know the second IP as well. Now for many reasons, but to mention one, security, Apple’s servers won’t send the reply to multiple IP’s. That’s why security certificates were put into place. So that someone trying to get in between a connection cannot access your information.
However, there are certain exceptions. But, you will never be able to do exactly what we’re all trying to do. (Yea, by that I do mean myself as well) All BS aside, we all know that it’s simple to get into nearby wireless networks. It would be great to be able to use both your ISP + your 40 year old neighbor’s network with that phat FiOS with 30MB down 20MB up bandwidth, or that sweet Cable connection with 50MB/50MB from that rich kid upstairs, so we can download, or serve, enormous amounts of data in one sitting… Although it cannot work exactly as we want, there’s a workaround. You can google the term “Load Sharing” or “Internet Load Sharing”. I wanted to do this a few months ago, but got sidetracked. There is a unix terminal application that you can program with a little help of a unix book, that will allow you to alternate between downloads.
What I mean by this is, that suppose you have 10 files that you want to download, and they’re all pretty big… Say, 700MB ~ 1.5GB… Catch my drift? Good… Now, this application will look at your two active internet connections and check which one is the one with the least traffic at the time. Say it’s that FiOS connection… Ok, so it will start to use that one for the first file. Then you start to download that second file… Now app will look for the connection again, and will see that the Cable connection has the least traffic. And so on and so forth.
Sorry that I don’t have any links, as I don’t have any time at the moment, and am just trying to share some of what I know. But this I do know works similar. There is a Cisco router, or several different Cisco routers. That will allow you to use to WAN connections. For those that may not know, a WAN is just a fancy way of saying Internet Connection, and stands for Wide-Area-Network (INTERNET, but for some larger corporations this is a mere GINORMOUS LAN).
Just make sure that the Cisco router isn’t just a “Failover” one. This just means, that you’ll pay, or have 2 internet connections, but only use one. Then when one is disconnected for whatever reason, the second connection takes over, without you losing any downtime. This is NOT what you want.
You are totally right, I will search for the right stuff, and I will put my results here (also I will correct the title of the post). Please if you had time to came back and put the links will be awesome.
Thank you again for your comments, Load Sharing was what I was looking for…