No subject

bonding works below the IP level and ADSL, as most ISP connections, are IP
only, not bridged usually.

[Jack:]
> If not do you have a HOW-TO or website for more
> info on bonding two DSL/Cable modem connections?

Depends what you're really trying to do.  Some guesses would include the
following: If you're really trying to build a _very_ distributed cluster,
you'd have to get point to point circuits to make it work.  If you're just
trying to get effective bandwidth past the technology limits, something like
multilink PPP, there is no commercially available solution...

[Warren:]
> Any theoretical bonding system would
> need to be supported by your provider too.

Exactly.  The providers deal with this in the tiers of service they provide.
If you're disatisfied with Bronze, get silver; maxed out Platinum, buy a
circuit. Or, get a cable modem ;-)

[Warren:]
> Bonding 2 cable modems would be
> of little use, because they would be using the same shared bandwidth.

Well, not exactly.  On the data link level, each cable modem has its own
allocation of time to respond, and thus bandwidth.  Multiple upstream
frequencies are used to accomodate growth and balance load.  Yes there is
'shared bandwidth' if you are talking in RF terms, but not in data
networking terms.  An unfortunate congruance of terms from the two different
worlds that DSL marketers like to take advantage of.

Back to guessing about the problem:  If instead of just needing more
bandwidth you need redundancy and failover...

[Warren, attributing Brian Chee:]
> load balancing and failover would be easy with
> two DSL links if they are from the same provider, but things get messy
with
> BGP if you want to do the same with two or more providers.  Both of your
> internet providers would have to agree to peer, and both providers would
> need an expert in BGP in order to make it work correctly.

If you're just trying to get a redundant connection to the Internet, not be
a source of content, its straight forward.  You have two potential default
routes, one fails, you turn on the other.  If you want to load balance, it
doesn't have to be hard.  Just round robin the sessions across one or the
other link.  You could even develop your own routing table by using ping
times or dns responses or traceroute hop counts.  It doesn't have to take
BGP.

If other people need to get to you though, thats different.  Then you need
to announce your addresses to the Internet.  That takes BGP.

[Deven Phillips:]
> It's not so much the lack of BGP experts, but the lack of Autonomous
> System Numbers (ASN). ARIN (Autonomous Registry of Internet 
> Numbers) has
> only 65535 ASNs to assign in IPv4, and most of those are gone. 

Or weren't even available since a significant number are reserved for
private use, just as there are IPs reserved.  The more significant limit is
actually the routing of IPs.  If you have modest needs, less than a /20
which is about 4000 addresses, the core Internet routing providers won't
announce your addresses and will filter them from their routing tables.
Reference http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0402routing.html

[Deven:]
> For a network to have two Internet connections
> with multiple gateways, there
> needs to be an ASN for that router.

Not exactly for the router, for the "Autonomous System".  That would be the
traditional multi-homing scenario, but there are a few ways to provide
multiple redundant multihoming connections to the Internet that don't
necessarily require this.  See:

http://www.radware.com/product/lproof/Default.htm
ftp://ftp.vix.com/pub/vixie/ifdefault/
http://www.internetweek.com/reviews01/rev030501-1.htm

I'm not recommending or endorsing anything here.  Just providing some
interesting pointers.  I have no clue still if this rambling has answered
the question originally asked.

TTFN,

-Doug-