Not long ago, I had my office server connected to the Internet through a consumer cable connection without a fixed IP address. This worked OK for a while as the IP address didn't change very much. But about 2 months ago the ISP changed the way they did things and my IP address was changing every day. I thought I had better bite the bullet and a get a business ADSL 2+ line with a fixed IP address, so I did. But I was reluctant to give up my cable connection as it had been reliable (plus the modem was all paid for). So I started to investigate the feasibility of keeping both Internet connections for redundancy and possible load balancing. I was surprised to find that there are quite a few routers out there that are designed to connect to multiple WANs and do all the failover and load balancing for you. The Linksys RV082 looked like a good candidate and I managed to find a second hand one for $150.00 (Australian). I was so surprised how easy it was to configure. I downloaded and installed the latest firmware to start with. Then I plugged the ADSL modem into one WAN port and the Cable modem into the other. I configured each connection and then ticked a box for load balancing and that was it.
Here's a photo of the whole rig:
Here's a couple of the config screens:
I was just so impressed with the RV082. It has been extremely reliable and does exactly what it is supposed to do with very easy configuration.
posted on Wednesday, August 29, 2007 10:44 PM