Need advice on a internet/gateway/firewall set-up

[Langdon Stevenson]

Thomas Fischer wrote:
> Hey all,
> 
> I need some advise on the best type of set-up under Fedora including 
> configuration examples to build a «dual-homing» gateway/firewall.
> 
> The idea is to have the following set-up
> 
>    internet_ip_1                  internet_ip_2
>          |                                       |
>          |                                       |
>          ------fedora_gateway-----
>                         |
>                   internal_network
> 
> So that is the network configuration, which will be put into place using 
> 3 physical ethernet cards. I am thinking of bonding the 2 internet 
> facing ethernet cards but not sure how that would work with the 2 
> internet ip addresses.
> 
> Any suggestions? How would I load balance the access across both networks?
> 
> Thanks for the help

Hi Thomas

I looked at the same issue recently (and had a Fedora system some years 
ago that did this).

My conclusion was that it was much cheaper and easier (for me) to just 
buy something like a Draytek Vigor 2910 router.  It has dual WAN inputs, 
does load balancing, failover etc.  For $380 (Australian) it was the 
right solution for me.

If you have the time and energy to invest, then your approach can 
certainly work.  I never had load balancing and failover working 
thought.  Just dedicated certain traffic to each connection.

Regards,
Langdon