FreeBSD router two DSL connections

[Danial Thom]

--- Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at toybox.placo.com>
wrote:

> 
>
http://www.edimax.com/html/english/products/PRI582.htm
> 
> "...Performs Outbound load balancing by
> session, weight round robin or
> traffic..."
> 
> Note that they say by SESSION not by PACKET.
> 
> It's marketingspeak.  They are simply using the
> term load balancing
> for a device that doesen't actually load
> balance.  Apparently
> they figure that if they say "session load
> balancing" even though
> there is no such accepted definition, that then
> they are somehow not
> lying.
> 
> It's akin to someone saying that "FreeBSD is a
> kind of Linux" in a
> sentence that uses Linux to indicate "open
> source operating systems"
> 
> Apparently you never heard the old saying  "A
> grain of truth is
> buried in all great lies"

I'm not sure what your primary language is, but
"round robin" IS packet balancing. 

Suppose you have 2 "pipes":

Round Robin:

1 packet to pipe1
1 packet to pipe2
1 packet to pipe1
1 packet to pipe2

Weighted round Robin, weighted 2 to 1:

1 packet to pipe1
1 packet to pipe1
1 packet to pipe2
1 packet to pipe1
1 packet to pipe1
1 packet to pipe2

"Per session" balancing may be useful when you
have paths that are not very "equal". If you load
balance to different ISPs packets could arrive
out of order (in fact they are likely to). This
is not really a problem for modern TCP stacks.
Session balancing, if done properly, should
guarantee that the ACKs for a download go out the
same pipe as the data is arriving. Its not clear
from the datasheet if thats the case, but thats
the correct way to do it.

Its seems like a quite comprehensive product to
me, from the docs. Ted's analysis is backwards.
"load balancing" is a vague term. "Weighted Round
Robin" is a more specific term for how they have
implemented the load balancing.

Danial



		
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