Dual-wan routers, misc. advice

Dance Commander

So, I'm living in a co-op and we have one cable modem serving 17 people. We accomplish this with a 4-port linksys wireless N router which is then hooked up to two switches that serve the house. This is slow. Very slow. As far as I can tell, there are two main problems:
1) One cable modem is not enough for this many people. No question. Not given that we're all college students and people like to stream video, etc.
2) The router control panel loads REALLY slowly, and DDWRT reports that 95% of its memory is in use. My hunch is that this tiny little home router is having a hard time doing NAT for 17+ clients.

So, what I'd like to do is cough up for a dual-wan router and get another cable modem. I have several questions though:
A lot of the dual-wan routers I see only have four LAN ports, but it's stated that they support up to 72 clients or 100 or some other pretty large number. Am I correct in assuming that these routers are intended to be hooked up to large switches?

I've heard that some dual-wan routers won't work if the two wan connections are on the same subnet--the idea being that you use different kinds of internet connection for redundancy. Am I going to have any problem just using two identical roadrunner cable modems?

How exactly does load-balancing work? Does it tend to split up traffic by service, or just according to where there is bandwidth available, or are there options for both?

Corollary: does web-embedded streaming video like youtube come over port 80? It would be nice if I could designate one modem as the low-latency modem, and just have http and games go over that, and get RR premium on the other modem and shunt all large file downloads to that, but if http includes youtube et al then I'm not sure how well that would work.

tl;dr: I have 17 people in a house and want to get a dual-wan router and two cable modems. Any recommendations as far as what to buy, how to configure, or pitfalls to avoid? My top priority is low latency for everyone, bandwidth is second.

Ruckus

1. Yes, hooking up multiple switches to the basic ports is how it's done. I recommend each additional switch get it's own link to one of those first ports (as opposed to daisy chaining).

2. Most dual WAN gateways I know of only support WAN fail-over, where they only use one WAN unless it is unavailable, and then try and use the other one. I've not heard anything about the WANs on the same subnet being an issue.

3. I don't know what protocols streaming video uses, I supposed it depends on the method.

As a fallback solution, you could get a second modem and router, and disable DHCP on the second router. Then the technically savvy people could give themselves static IP's and set their gateway to the new one. You just need to plug one LAN port from the new router to a port on one your switches.

vonPoonBurGer

This is the cheapest one I've seen that supports load balancing. Other than the few reviews on NewEgg, I haven't seen a lot of feedback on it, so I don't know how good it is. This one costs more than twice as much but has a much larger user base. There's also an 8-port version (RV082) that's ~$100 cheaper, but NewEgg doesn't carry it.

AngelHedgie

Dance Commander wrote: »

A lot of the dual-wan routers I see only have four LAN ports, but it's stated that they support up to 72 clients or 100 or some other pretty large number. Am I correct in assuming that these routers are intended to be hooked up to large switches?

Yep. At work here, we have our router/firewall/DHCP server linked to a set of switches that form our backbone.

Dance Commander wrote: »

I've heard that some dual-wan routers won't work if the two wan connections are on the same subnet--the idea being that you use different kinds of internet connection for redundancy. Am I going to have any problem just using two identical roadrunner cable modems?

You shouldn't, but to be sure, make sure to ask for them to provide you with modems on separate subnets.

Dance Commander wrote: »

How exactly does load-balancing work? Does it tend to split up traffic by service, or just according to where there is bandwidth available, or are there options for both?

Load balancing usually comes in three flavors - percentage of total bandwidth, round-robin, and failover.

• Percentage is the simplest to use - you just set how much of the traffic goes over each line. The problem is that the router may not care HOW it's divying up the bandwidth, so a single connection from a computer may have its packets passed through both lines - and sometimes, applications REALLY don't like that. In that case, you'll want to either see if you can set the router to make sure that connections use the same line always, or go to...
• Round-robin, which is connection based, passing off connections to the two lines. The problem is that not every connection is equal, and some may be more bandwidth-intensive. Pass all those to one line, and you'll see one route get choked to death while the other is hardly used.
• Failover is a special case, and you only want to use it if your secondary line is metered. In that case, you set up the router that if usage goes over a certain amount, it will push the overage onto the failover line. Again, only useful if you don't want to use the secondary line except during peak usage.

AngelHedgie

vonPoonBurGer wrote: »

This is the cheapest one I've seen that supports load balancing. Other than the few reviews on NewEgg, I haven't seen a lot of feedback on it, so I don't know how good it is. This one costs more than twice as much but has a much larger user base. There's also an 8-port version (RV082) that's ~$100 cheaper, but NewEgg doesn't carry it.

Personally, I really like the SonicWALL TZ180 we use at work, but to get it configured for dual-WAN operation is about $700 ($400 for the router, plus $300 for the Enhanced OS upgrade.)

AngelHedgie

Dance Commander wrote: »

So, I'm living in a co-op and we have one cable modem serving 17 people. We accomplish this with a 4-port linksys wireless N router which is then hooked up to two switches that serve the house. This is slow. Very slow. As far as I can tell, there are two main problems:
1) One cable modem is not enough for this many people. No question. Not given that we're all college students and people like to stream video, etc.
2) The router control panel loads REALLY slowly, and DDWRT reports that 95% of its memory is in use. My hunch is that this tiny little home router is having a hard time doing NAT for 17+ clients.

17 clients? I've burned out Linksys routers with 10.

If you have a spare machine, I would seriously try setting up a Linux server and configure it for DNS and DHCP service. That alone should take the MAJORITY of the pain off your poor router's shoulders.

Dance Commander

Well, I don't have any spare boxes lying around since I'm at school and I tend to keep my possessions to minimum. Can you recommend a load balancing router that costs under $400? Xincom routers look solid for the price, but I can't find them for sale any place.

AngelHedgie

Dance Commander wrote: »

Well, I don't have any spare boxes lying around since I'm at school and I tend to keep my possessions to minimum. Can you recommend a load balancing router that costs under $400? Xincom routers look solid for the price, but I can't find them for sale any place.

Well, I'd recommend first adding an actual DNS/DHCP server to the network before buying a router, to see if that relieves the stress. I have a feeling the issue isn't your pipe so much as your router is having a nervous breakdown. Also, are you using Wi-Fi? If you are, that's yet ANOTHER headache.

exoplasm

Considering the costs of these suggested routers you might want to just get a spare PC with 2 NICs and setup m0n0wall. http://m0n0.ch/wall/

Then use your existing router(s) just for wifi access (disable dhcp and routing functions, etc).

You'll probably need to setup QOS ahd/or ban bit torrent/kazaa/limewire/etc use to keep the connection from being killed.

Also you can find a spare computer for cheap on craigslist/ebay and even at goodwill.