I have just moved into a flat with 7 other guys. They currently have two ADSL2 connections coming in, both syncing at around 18 meg downstream for a combined 36 meg. There is no flat wide LAN setup right now, therefore 3 guys are connecting wired/wirelessly to one router and 4 to the other. Obviously, for gaming and filesharing this is less than ideal so I'd like to LAN everyone together, 8 pcs + servers/consoles etc.
On the network I plan to have a server machine running as a DNS/DHCP/teamspeak/fileserver/VPN gateway/webserver, although the latter two roles are just for me to play around with. There is a possibility of having a 2nd fileserver but I'm not sure about that at this point. Also in the flat are 3 PS3s and two Xbox 360s which all require internet connectivity. I would like to have at least one wireless access point on the network for laptops/PDAs/smartphones.
I'm relatively happy with creating the internal LAN segment of the network: I have two gigabit switches and will use two cables to connect them together to hopefully avoid any bottlenecks. The 8 computers, server(s), wirless access point and other wired devices will all just be plugged into the switches. Nice and simple so far.
This issue comes with the 2 ADSL connections. The connections will used for gaming, browsing and downloading (torrent/newsgroups etc). Therefore both ping and speed should be as good as possible. I want to make the most of the available bandwidth.
I know I can manually configure the DHCP leasing in Server 2003 to assign devices equally between each gateway. However, this has the potential to not make the best use of the two connections and could lead to one connection being saturated whilst the other is barely used. Does anyone know of a better way to configure this?
I've heard of load balancing and bonded lines but it's a bit of a minefield and it's beginning to get past what I know confortably. I'm sure there are enterprise level solutions but I don't have that kind of money to spend! I could stretch to maybe £150 if there was a hardware solution but ideally I'd like to do it in software. I have no doubt that there is probably an obscure linux distro. designed specifically to do this!
If anyone can spot any flaws in my plan please let me know. Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any advice.
On the network I plan to have a server machine running as a DNS/DHCP/teamspeak/fileserver/VPN gateway/webserver, although the latter two roles are just for me to play around with. There is a possibility of having a 2nd fileserver but I'm not sure about that at this point. Also in the flat are 3 PS3s and two Xbox 360s which all require internet connectivity. I would like to have at least one wireless access point on the network for laptops/PDAs/smartphones.
I'm relatively happy with creating the internal LAN segment of the network: I have two gigabit switches and will use two cables to connect them together to hopefully avoid any bottlenecks. The 8 computers, server(s), wirless access point and other wired devices will all just be plugged into the switches. Nice and simple so far.
This issue comes with the 2 ADSL connections. The connections will used for gaming, browsing and downloading (torrent/newsgroups etc). Therefore both ping and speed should be as good as possible. I want to make the most of the available bandwidth.
I know I can manually configure the DHCP leasing in Server 2003 to assign devices equally between each gateway. However, this has the potential to not make the best use of the two connections and could lead to one connection being saturated whilst the other is barely used. Does anyone know of a better way to configure this?
I've heard of load balancing and bonded lines but it's a bit of a minefield and it's beginning to get past what I know confortably. I'm sure there are enterprise level solutions but I don't have that kind of money to spend! I could stretch to maybe £150 if there was a hardware solution but ideally I'd like to do it in software. I have no doubt that there is probably an obscure linux distro. designed specifically to do this!
If anyone can spot any flaws in my plan please let me know. Thanks for reading and thanks in advance for any advice.