The other day my cousin asked me how to combine two internet connections and use both of them at the same time. As per my old knowledge, even if two ethernet cards are available on the PC, an application cannot directly use both the IPs, do load balancing, and pump up the overall speed. This is because a TCP cannot cannot be shared over two different IPs. Once a TCP connection is established, lets us say by a browser, it cannot switch to the other one on the same PC.
Having said to my cousin that this is not possible by default I explored and found some interesting stuff which proves me wrong (I am happy that I am wrong). I guess the technical word for the above is "Link Aggregation". This is also called LAN or NIC Teaming, multi-link trunking etc. Having said this, let me also say that you cannot achieve this with just having two ethernet cards and two internet connections. The LAN cards should be capable of providing this support and the OS should have corresponding drivers. I am not sure what kind of ethernet cards are capable of doing it. But read on...
There are ready made products to uncomplicate things for you, but they are a bit pricey as of now. They are called dual-wan routers. If I understand correctly, they do NAT translation internally and achieve load balancing and high-availability (failover support).
Links to related discussions: link1, link2, link3
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Saturday, June 20, 2009
How to fix 169.x.x.x IP problem in windows vista
The other day me and my friend were struggling to fix this funny problem in windows vista where it always gets 169.x.x.x IP address. And because of this the PC is not able to connect to the internet. When we searched that net I am surprised to see the number of people facing this problem. But unfortunately, the solutions offered in those forums did not work for us. We tried many things like disabling the DHCP and assigning a static IP address, editing some settings in registery entry for the network connection, remvoing and adding the connection again etc.
At the end of an hour or so, when we found the fix for the problem we felt like slapping our face because the problem is such a stupid problem. Ok, the problem is that the mcafee is installed on the machine and the firewall is enabled thereby forming a proxy network which is not allowing us to directly connect to the internet. We simply disabled the firewall in mcafee and voila!, we are able to connect to the internet.
It may not be such a good idea to completely disable the firewall as the machine is directly exposed to the internet. There should be some solution to connect to the internet while the firewall is enabled. But, we will worry about it for some other day.
At the end of an hour or so, when we found the fix for the problem we felt like slapping our face because the problem is such a stupid problem. Ok, the problem is that the mcafee is installed on the machine and the firewall is enabled thereby forming a proxy network which is not allowing us to directly connect to the internet. We simply disabled the firewall in mcafee and voila!, we are able to connect to the internet.
It may not be such a good idea to completely disable the firewall as the machine is directly exposed to the internet. There should be some solution to connect to the internet while the firewall is enabled. But, we will worry about it for some other day.
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