Traffic Shaping, Failover tools

Question

I have just become the only IT manager of a small business. We have multiple internet providers (Comcast, Time Warner, XO and Qwest).

I'm looking for some solutions that can aggregate those connections, and use traffic shaping to provide the best route.

What are some of my options? Free? Low cost?

I don't mind using a linux based system either.

Just need some options.

Answer 1

I suggest to use Linux for networking access management server.

Many free tools you can use on Linux.

For example, you can use HTB for traffic shaping. Refer to following article:

http://blog.kovyrin.net/2006/04/06/5min-guide-to-linux-shaping-htb/

Answer 2

Suggestions for a combined system.

• The cache and other things: Squid and the accelerator mode (at the Squid Cache Wiki)
• Content filtering: SquidGuard (there is also DansGuardian)
• Tracking things: MRTG
• And, maybe Netmon too

Some more reading on Squid load balancing at the Sun site.
Squid for balancing connections over multiple links.

And, You should take this question to serverfault

Answer 3

It seems like FreeBSD or OpenBSD with the pf packetfilter and ALTQ traffic shaping would suit your needs. See an example of load-balancing outgoing connections here. Note that this example assumes each gateway has equal bandwidth; if that isn't true or approximately true, you can repeat its listing in the route-to directive and it'll be picked twice as often. That might get cumbersome fast, especially if you have some small and some large pipes, but it's a start.