
Redundant Array of Flaky Connections - jakozaur
http://www.sumologic.com/blog/technology/rafc-internet-connectivity-for-the-cloud-age
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DenisM
I could use a RAFC right now for cell-based internet here in Russia. There are
4 providers for wireless internet (3 UMTS and one CDMA450) and none of the
three UMTS work reliably. Haven't tested the last one yet.

~~~
keltex
Looks like the peplink guys (cited in the article) have just the thing for
you:

<http://www.peplink.com/max-mobile-router/>

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icebraining
_we have connection outages almost daily_

Seriously? Is this considered acceptable for residential ISPs in California?
Here I'd find one outage every month to be unacceptable, much less daily ones!

~~~
weirdedhimself
Yeah, for consumer level ISPs in California, sadly, this is a reality. I've
used Comcast, AT&T U-Verse, sonic.net, Speakeasy, etc over the years, and they
all had outages.

Amongst the better ones were Speakeasy and sonic.net. Comcast is amongst the
worst. Especially here on Castro Street in downtown Mountain View, which is
basically littered with tech startups, things are pretty bad.

~~~
ScottBurson
Huh, that's odd. I live in Sunnyvale and have had very little trouble with
Comcast connectivity for most of the last several years. There was one period
of time when I was seeing frequent (> daily) connection loss, but that was
cured by a cable modem upgrade.

~~~
weirdedhimself
Let me add some nuance here: We have the "business" offering from Comcast. It
was the only offering that had 100MBit/s when we signed up. With the
"business" offering, you are forced to use the "business" modem.

The modem is made by SMC. It is a full firewall/gateway. Unfortunately, the
software on it is not very stable. For about 4-5 months, we worked with
Comcast customer support to resolve this. They tried many different things to
fix the issue, without success. My conclusion was that the software on the SMC
modem just crashes once a day or so, and then hangs.

Eventually, I convinced them to let us use the "simple" residential Motorola
modem. That has worked much better. It still crashes every 1-2 weeks, but
that's almost acceptable.

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omh
One advantage not mentioned here is when you need to perform maintenance.
Being able to take any single device offline without affecting the service
means that you can perform software upgrades or hardware replacements with
more flexibility (and often within working hours)

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InclinedPlane
The biggest problem with this is the difference in ToS between consumer grade
and business grade connections. If you try to use a consumer comcast cable
connection for business you may run into things like bandwidth caps, filtered
ports, etc.

~~~
wmf
You should definitely get business service if you're going to do this; it's
not that much more expensive.

~~~
InclinedPlane
Yes, and that's actually what they did here, even though they label them
"consumer grade" connections.

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SlipperySlope
Looks great for client-side connections!

I wonder to what degree this is a solution for office-based servers. How would
DNS failover be handled?

~~~
weirdedhimself
Even though we don't run any office-based servers at Sumo Logic, the
recommended way is to make the Peplink a DNS server. It will then serve the IP
of the currently active link...

They also just sent me this in an email:

"Our revolutionary SpeedFusion technology is now available. Adding a wealth of
innovations that take Peplink/Pepwave gear to the next level, SpeedFusion
provides Balance users a cost-effective, high-bandwidth, and reliable
alternative to using expensive MPLS connections in their branch VPNs, while
SpeedFusion 4G/3G Bonding gives MAX users the ultimate in speedy and
dependable networking on the road. Blazing fast, secure, and easy to manage,
SpeedFusion is part of Firmware 5.4, so download this new release and become
part of the SpeedFusion revolution today."

<http://www.peplink.com/speedfusion>

~~~
SlipperySlope
Looks great and thanks for the tip.

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bdb
We do basically the same thing at our office, though with IOS Event Manager
foo sprinkled in. It works great.

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excuse-me
1, "Set up multiple consumer grade internet connections."

2, Discover that all of them are just reselling the same service provider's
product and they all go to the same cable in the same junction box under the
street.

Even with totally independent enterprise grade 'N'-9s uptime guarantees we
discovered they are in the same trench under the road outside our site. A lot
of major data centers have discovered that it only takes a single idiot with a
backhoe.

~~~
Robin_Message
I assume that's why they got both cable and DSL, although depending on how
things work out they might still run in the same trench.

~~~
weirdedhimself
Trench? Wishful thinking in California. :) There's a big telephone pole behind
our building, and both the cable and phone lines run from the building to the
pole...

This setup is by no means good enough to run any mission critical services off
of. It is, however, a big improvement over a single business line to keep a
group of 30-40 people reliably connected to the internet.

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rscale
We helped a client of ours setup something akin to this, to work around their
(essentially unfixable) Internet situation.

We rolled our solution using OpenBSD/pf/carp/pfsync due to client expertise
and comfort with BSD. It works well enough that outages on their lines have
shown up only as nagios alerts, not actual outages, even through many years of
service.

