I presently have my ISPConfig webserver serving through my local cable company who has alloted me enough static IP's to get the job done and applied a "business class" policy to the modem so I get 1 meg out and about 2 in. Problem is recently they have had several outages which have lasted up to 25 hours and this is unacceptable to me. I can also get DSL with similar specifications and I was wondering what would be involved in setting up 2 completely seperate providers for use with one instance of ISPConfig and making the connection fail over from one to the other? -J
An expensive method would be to get a router such as the Netgear FVX538. Plug in the 2 different providers and your on your way. Dave
Its not really an ISPConfig question. Its more of a networking question and it would depend on your setup, whether you wanted just failover or full load balancing. It's very cheap and easy to do for outgoing connections, but for incoming it gets more complex. How does the client know what path to take to get to your server? Generaly speaking you will need to run BGP, and with all due respect to Netgear they are not going to help you. Cisco is your best choice of equipment, or else Juniper, setup is less than trivial and it won't be cheap. Certainly not worth it for a DSL connection. And that is if you can get agreement from your ISP's to do it, which for cable or DSL I think is unlikely. This is why people colocate their servers. My advice is either find a better ISP and don't set up a second connection, or if you are determined you need redundant ISP links, buy some rackspace somewhere and let them take care of the details, or just use a hosting company. DIY redundant links are expensive and difficult. Just had a thought, it is kludgy and a workaround and the cons probably outweigh the benefits, but in theory, you could multihome your server, with both the cable and dsl static IP's. Then using a dynamic DNS service, or maybe Zone Edit, I don't know a real lot about either service, in the event of an outage, manually switch IP's with the service providers - but it is an ugly answer. Well actually you could do that with your DNS provider anyway (or within ISPConfig if you are using DNS functionality), but it can take a while for the tables to propagate.
