Dual Broadband Installed, Network Rebuilt

Some of you will recall the plans to upgrade to Dual Broadband as brought on by the Year-Long Saga. Qwest delivered their modem as promised, and it’s up and running.

Initially, the plan was to set up a load balancer to pipe outgoing connections to whichever outbound network had the most bandwidth available at the time. Then I realized that Comcast is several times faster than Qwest; their lack of reliability is the only reason I bothered to get the DSL.

In addition to being half as fast and twice as expensive, Qwest purposefully disables your Internet connection until you log into the modem directly and enter a username and password they don’t give you. Great — I already hate them.

So all our machines were configured with dual gateways: They will attempt to connect to Comcast first, and Qwest when that attempt fails. Qwest’s only purpose in life is to serve as a backup to Comcast.

Port forwarding was disabled since the modem serves DHCP on x.x.0.x and our network runs on x.x.1.x and x.x.2.x. The DSL modem literally refuses to forward any incoming traffic to an IP not on its own little subnet. Screw ‘em, the router we put there will do it. I have to admit, it is kinda cool to have a home network with dual pipes, failover configuration, two servers, and three subnets.

Now, if only I could get this damned car to work