OT - Controlling usage from 2 ISP's

I'm almost certain that OpenWRT comes with "cron" (or has it as an installable package). Fairly good chance that it's available in Tomato as well.

You could run cron jobs at midnight and 5, as well as at other times if you want to measure traffic counts and start using connection 1 during "peak hours" when you're well clear of the 10GB limits.

I think both of these also include "iptables" support, which you'd want for any number of purposes... traffic-flow monitoring, packet/connection tagging by destination (you might always push certain sorts of connections over the slower "unlimited" link, for example).

I'm sure you could do all of this, and more, with a stock trimmed-down Linux distro running on any old PC having two or three Ethernet cards... but certainly it would be convenient to do it on a small embedded-system router/switch device to minimize power concerns.

I can't recall seeing any of the consumer-grade routers which have this sort of configuration flexibility "out of the box"... they're normally defined with one "WAN" port, and the rest of the ports being switched together to create the "LAN". However, most of them seem to use a very flexible/programmable switch chip "under the covers" and I think you could re-purpose e.g. an older WRT54G to let you use any number of its ports as separate network connections.

Congratulations. You are now "multi-homed". If you only had one internet connection at a time, you would be needed a "fall back" type router using RIP2.

What you're looking for is a "traffic managment", "load balancing", and QoS (quality of service). Brainslayer of DD-WRT wants extra money for proper QoS on DD-WRT. I think you can add a traffic manager to DD-WRT but getting it work correctly in the limited RAM found in most cheap routers is a challenge. Instead, I suggest something a bit more complexicated, such as PFsense: Search for "Multi-WAN" and PFsense. To make the necessary changes at midnight and 5AM, use a shell script to enable/disable the Connection 1 interface such as: ifconfig eth0 down ifconfig eth0 up which is run by cron at midnight and 5AM.

That should get you armed with a suitable collection of buzzwords with which you can hopefully find the correct newsgroup. Good luck.

Thanks for the info David, that gets me looking in the right direction. Until I get it right, I'll probably just put each connection on a separate router and connect to the fast one when I'm not cutting close on the limit.

RogerN

Yes, thanks Jeff, that certainly helps. If I can't get that figured out, maybe I'll just get some $5 appliance timers and power up the routers at the appropriate time! :-) I was looking at info on setting up the firewall, thought maybe I could block some streaming media and downloads from the limited connection if I can get different IP tables selected with cron or something like that. Or just like you suggested, disable or enable eth0 at the appropriate times.

It sure eats up a lot of time to do these time saving projects!

Thanks,

RogerN

Just Google "Bonded WAN" and look at the offerings.

I have a Peplink that does fall back bandwidth limiting and so on. It is nice to have all the port 80 junk going out the DSL while all the media streaming gets pushed over to the 50mbs cable modem.