Setting Up Multilink PPP on el6
This guide is meant to walk you through setting up a multilink PPP connection under Fedora 13.
Overview
Multilink PPP, MP, but sometimes referred to as MPPP, provides three main benefits.
Load Balancing
When both links are up, MP will bond the two links and provide extra bandwidth. It is important to note that both links will run at the slower speed, times two.
For example; If one link runs at 5.0 Mbps down and 800 Kbps up while the second link runs at 6.0 Mbps down and 512 Kbps up, your bonded speed will be (5.0 + 5.0) 10 Mbps down and (512 + 512) 1.24 Mbps up.
High Availability
The bonded MP can work perfectly well when a given link fails, albeit with a reduced bandwidth.
This paper bonds two DSL accounts, but this is not a requirement. In fact, it's quite common to bond connections from DSL and cable ISPs to improve availability.
Privacy
Let me say up front that MP is no replacement for proper encryption. Further, it does nothing to provide anonymity on the Internet itself.
Now, with that said, the way that MP works makes it much more difficult for people between you and your ISP to see the contents of your traffic. This is particularly useful if you are a customer of an ISP who resells a major carrier's service which uses deep packet inspection (DPI) to detect and throttle certain connection types, like bittorrent. As a side effect, other connection types like SSH are throttled as well. This can pose a serious headache for sysadmins trying to work on servers from throttled connections.
By setting up MP, a sysadmin should be able to protect their traffic's content from the prying eyes of the upstream ISP.
Requirements
There are three sets of requirements in order to make the most of this tutorial; System Administration experience and Hardware.
ISP Support
Your ISP must support MP. Otherwise this simply won't work.
Sysadmin Experience
This assumes a certain level of familiarity with the command line in Linux, specifically bash or similar. It also is assumed that you have a familiarity with networking in general and PPPoE specifically.
Technical Requirements
A computer with three network interfaces (ideally wired) is required. I'm adding a wireless link so that the router can also act as a wireless access point. If you are not concerned with this step, feel free to skip it.
For this article, an Asus Eee PC 1000H netbook will be used. Two Apple USB Ethernet Adapters (part number MB442Z/A) are used to provide the connection to two bridged DSL modems.
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