Bandwidth over many interfaces

[rod at tpgi.com.au]

> William HeagueHi all.
> Has anyone had any luck spreading network loads over many interfaces to increase bandwidth?
> what I mean is, say I wanna stick 5 100mb NICs in a box 'cos I can't afford gigabit ethernet, and run them all to the same switch. Then I do something crazy like route every 2nd packet down the 2nd interface, every 3rd packet down the 3rd interface etc.
> responses to the packet would come back down the interface they were sent, and reassembled in order once collected on the box. Latency might suck, but it'd at least share the load a bit. 
> 
> I'm sure there are other ways to do this as well, and people must have tried before. Any suggestions?
> 
> -James
> 

Yup,
Grab a coffee and a copy of the advanced routing howto and check chapter 10 
load sharing using TEQL. We were able to bond 2 10baseT connections no 
problems using a pair of P150's that were laying around.  Worked quite well 
without stressing the CPU's at all at approx 20m bits throughput.

I believe its not much use if there is only one TCP session due to a packet 
ordering gotcha but I was connecting two subnets so it wasn't an issue.

Cheers
-Rod