Post by Larry C.Scott, can that be done with almost any router or only with a full featured
router?
I only have experience with two consumer hardware routers and both do not
support this sort of thing. So as far as I know only professional hardware
routers will do it. I can't say for sure though. What I can say for sure
is that there are routers that do support load balancing and dynamic
routing. I doubt they are priced for consumers but I can't say for sure.
If you don't mind running an old and useless computer as your router you can
do it with an old 486 or greater using a single bootable floppy that runs
Linux underneath it all. Don't even need a hard drive. That's my plan.
Most people that would care about load balancing gotta have an old and
worthless computer to be useful for this. Without a hard disk it won't make
much noise, will not produce much heat, and won't draw much power. What's
great is that once you get it set how you want, commit those changes to the
floppy, pull it out, write protect it, and put it back in. Even if someone
were to hack it all you gotta do is reboot.
There are similar things on a boot CD as well that are supposed to be even
better than the floppy versions. It's my understanding that with some of
these you don't need any Linux knowledge at all to know how to use it.
Others you do need a bit of Linux knowledge. I haven't done this yet so I
can't say for sure or make personal recommendations. I know two people that
are using a bootable CD router for load balancing on an old machine and love
the performance it gives them. They had a similiar problem as the OP for
this thread. After using a cheap machine and this software router their
performance got better for more than one reason. It turns out our cheap
cable modem routers are so cheaply designed that even for basic NAT routing
a SW router on a PC provides better performance. This one I can say that I
have measured and observed myself. I used to run a Linux router for sharing
the cable modem but stopped when I got wireless. It was easier to replace
my old Linux router with the hardware one since I needed it for the wireless
anyway. Since I've noticed a serious performance drop (and measured
scientifically) with the hardware router I'm going to revert back to my SW
router on a Linux machine and add in load balancing for increased
performance for the things I care about.
OK... that was much too long of a post to answer your question. :) Feel
free to ask more questions. I'll try my best to answer them.
Scott