From owner-freebsd-net@FreeBSD.ORG Sat Apr 14 05:40:32 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Delivered-To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.freebsd.org (mx1.freebsd.org [69.147.83.52]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id CD49116A400 for ; Sat, 14 Apr 2007 05:40:32 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from gore_jarold@yahoo.com) Received: from web63005.mail.re1.yahoo.com (web63005.mail.re1.yahoo.com [69.147.96.216]) by mx1.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 8379E13C4AD for ; Sat, 14 Apr 2007 05:40:32 +0000 (UTC) (envelope-from gore_jarold@yahoo.com) Received: (qmail 27115 invoked by uid 60001); 14 Apr 2007 05:13:52 -0000 DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=s1024; d=yahoo.com; h=X-YMail-OSG:Received:Date:From:Subject:To:MIME-Version:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding:Message-ID; b=wR7JOtevlZMmH/6BRTR/5jRpzotF/LxMlF/ONzUKOmkCdWeIfvv+o9kTEFI7NUtG/fs5d4tG6btuauj/IQr55itXOr85/mPvIT7TDsBqJOg3ikmS4WlaW+yDdnWHOOuYL1fDxNRD6KiSvsAhp7hpM2jpyFHfWMqi/sl93Vgmt9k=; X-YMail-OSG: q328ZjgVM1mzZt57ZqkUGaJ8C3HIT0B4uc3dUa5.ESUMAUHRx.SU0kA7AAJ6b505SdHrUnxPrsfnrh7.SdAS7fW9NPfM_b6rrpgJ Received: from [75.72.230.91] by web63005.mail.re1.yahoo.com via HTTP; Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:13:52 PDT Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 22:13:52 -0700 (PDT) From: Gore Jarold To: freebsd-net@freebsd.org MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-ID: <100774.26745.qm@web63005.mail.re1.yahoo.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Content-Filtered-By: Mailman/MimeDel 2.1.5 Subject: WiFi channel bonding with netgraph - possible ? Back end needed ? X-BeenThere: freebsd-net@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.5 Precedence: list List-Id: Networking and TCP/IP with FreeBSD List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2007 05:40:33 -0000 Let's say I live in a dorm room, or a large condo building. And let's say that everyone has the same ISP, and everyone is getting 3 mbps down and 512 kbps up, and there is no possibility of a better connection. And finally, let's say that everyone is running wide open wifi access points. Would it be possible to equip a computer with four (or more) wireless ethernet cards, jump on four open APs simultaneously, and bond them all together with netgraph to get a 12 mbps down and 2 mbps up connection ? The two main conceptual questions I have about this are: - do I need a back end somewhere (a collocated server) to tie all four connections back together into one again ? If I round-robin through the cards for each network request that would not _truly_ give me a bonded connection, and I wouldn't often get the full bonded bandwidth (unless I was doing lots of tiny, concurrent network transfers). It would seem that if I wanted to truly bond the connections into one, I would need them all to talk to some central server that would represent it to the world as a single IP ... - I have read that bonding wireless cards with netgraph is not as easy as bonding normal ethernet cards, because you need to arbitrarily assign and re-assign MAC addresses over and over on the fly, and the firmwares of many wireless cards do not allow one to do this ... I believe I saw a posting from a few years back that indicated Lucent cards (for instance) could not do this ... Comments ? The idea is to bond things into one, single, usable connection that could provide multiple connections worth of bandwidth for single-threaded network transactions (like downloading a single file from an ftp server). Perhaps there is a better tool to do this with than netgraph ? --------------------------------- Ahhh...imagining that irresistible "new car" smell? Check outnew cars at Yahoo! Autos.