Using Multiple Internet Connections

[ccbce]

Ok, a question about setting up multiple internet connections on a single wingate machine.
Situation: small college - students and staff
Wanted scheme: Staff on 2m dedicated fast response line
Students on 4m down 256k up ADSL line
Dedicated router: 192.168.0.1
Adsl Router: 192.168.0.10
Wingate nic: 192.168.0.4

I see in the www proxy the possibilities for rotating connections and setting failsafe priorities. But that is not quite what I want to do as I described above. I want the students and staff using separate connections. Is there a way to do this? I had an idea to try and was going to try it on a test server. We currently use a single nic which has the gateway of the 2m dedicated line and dhcp over this same ip address (192.168.0.4) for the network. What if I add another nic (192.168.4.12) and set it's gateway to the adsl line (192.168.0.10), i then adjust my dhcp tables so that the students get assigned an ip that has the gateway of the new nic which in turn is set in windows to point to the gateway of 192.168.4.10.

Is this all possible or am I mistaking how wingate sends traffic?

Thanks,
Jared

[Nev]

Hi Jared,

Not quite sure if this what you want, you can assign the proxy to 'Gateway' to a particular connection.

Create two WWW Proxies, one point to each connection only.

Configure the clients to access their respective proxy can divide the connections.

[logan]

This will be a piece of cake with WinGate 7 =)

[ccbce]

Hi Jared,

Not quite sure if this what you want, you can assign the proxy to 'Gateway' to a particular connection.

Create two WWW Proxies, one point to each connection only.

Configure the clients to access their respective proxy can divide the connections.

Thanks for that info Nev! I will try that out on my test server and get back to the board on how that works out.

This will be a piece of cake with WinGate 7 =)

well that doesn't do me much good now! ;)
HAHA, just kidding. Thanks for the info though that we can look forward to doing that easier in the future!

[alyork]

Hmm. Could use multiple internet connections too.

The situation is that there are 2 different ADSL suppliers and we would like to have both of them service the same Wingate server. That way if one fails, which happens often in this case, there would still be a connection via the other supplier.

Of couse we'd expect Wingate to do load balancing and automatc failover including the SMTP outbound mail routing.

[adrien]

should already be able to do that (load-balancing and fail-over).

If you have gateway monitoring enabled, then WinGate will check which gateways are responsive. WinGate 6.5.x does this a different way to 6.2. 6.2 did an ARP request, which only really told us if the gateway device was still alive in any way (responding to ARP). 6.5 does effectively a tracert, which tells you if the link is up to 3 hops. that way if you are on a DSL/NAT device, if the DSL connection goes down, WinGate 6.5 will see it, but 6.2 won't, since it won't take down the LAN-side interface.

Anyway, once you have gateway monitoring enabled, WinGate then maintains status of gateways which it will allocate to a connection being made by a proxy.

This means if you select round-robin connections and add both gateways, it will also do fail-over, since it won't assign a gateway it believes to be dead to a session.

Be wary about HTTP over this though, since it does it on a connection-by-connection basis, and so a single internal client may be hitting a remote server with both your external IPs which can confuse the server scripts.

but for SMTP delivery it should be a doddle.

Also be aware that this doesn't apply to NAT traffic. NAT traffic simply chooses the default route with the lowest metric. We don't remove the route that is associated with the dead connection, so NAT won't do failover or round-robin.

The structure of WinGate 7 allows you to associate gateways with anything (e.g client IP, username/group, time of day, whatever). It also allows plug-ins which could do load balancing etc. So you can do primitive load-balancing in policy out of the box, but for more sophisticated load-balancing we'll need to write specific support for that (which is on our roadmap).

Regards

Adrien

P.S I just uploaded 6.5.2 build 1217, which changes the target IP we use for the tracert based gateway monitoring. I'm updating the download links and readmes now.