[lug] Anyone with PPP multilink experience?

[Charles Morrison]

Harris, James wrote:

>Howdy all --
>
>I've hit a new low of desperation for speed and am looking into multilink
>PPP as an option.  Looks pretty do-able, and FRII supports it for $35/mo
>total.  I can get work to pay for half the total cost of the two phone lines
>and the ISP charge, so overall, it seems like I could get a pretty decent
>boost for cheap.  I'm wondering if anyone has any experiences that they
>would be able to share with this type of setup; gotcha's, things to
>consider, recommendations, additional reading, etc.?
>
I'm doing this with a SUSE distro. It works pretty well most of the 
time. I'm in an area where 21k is a really fast connection. using 
multilink gets me up to ~56k speeds sometimes. At less ideal times it at 
least keeps a slower connection up instead of dropping regularly.

Let's see, setup. Make sure this is supported in your kernel, which is 
to say you have to rebuild it. Make sure you select the 
incomplete/development option or you'll never find it. I'm using NAT so 
I had to do a bunch of ther kernel tweaks too.

>
>
>My intent is to use the 2.4.x series of PPP and the kernel to get true
>multilink support.  I'm still a bit unclear about some of the technical info
>surrounding multilink.  My biggest question is: can I down the second
>portion of the bundle if I need to use the second phone line, or do both
>portions of the bundle _always_ have to be up for it to work?
>
Yes, the second portion can go down without problem, although it may 
slow you down, but not the first.

>
>I'd love to hear any feedback that anyone would have to offer.  I've looked
>into ISDN and with the extra cost of the hardware and setup, it seems like
>multilink would be an acceptably cheaper alternative (I already have the
>phone lines and second, matched V.90 modem avail.)  Right now I'm
>consistently getting about 43k when I dialup, so x2 = wouldn't be bad.  I
>understand that the latency won't improve, but that's what Squid and DNS
>caching are for right?  :-)
>
>Thanks!
>Jim Harris
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>