2025-01-28
Recent customer complaint: “Our internet at the office was down AGAIN yesterday. I had to work on my laptop using my cellphone as a wifi hotspot.” If you have a single internet pipe to your office, internet outages can be common. However, adding a secondary internet connection as a “backup” doesn’t come without complexities.
First, it sucks to pay a high monthly fee for something that only gets used when your other high monthly fee internet pipe goes down. Second, and the more challenging issue is two different sets of public IP addresses. Now you have to go “whitelist” two different sets of public IPs for your cloud services such as SMTP relay in O365, and “fail-over” for remote IPSEC VPN tunnels becomes a technical nightmare. Yes, there’s BGP, but that is both complicated and expensive in that it requires that you own your own ARIN-registered /24 block of public IPs.
The solution? Simple. Talk to me about Bigleaf. I call it “BGP-made-easy” for the technical folks, but for the executives it’s simply: “Always-on internet”. Connect up to (4) internet pipes to a Bigleaf router, and then plug your Bigleaf router into your firewall WAN1 port. Boom. Intelligently load-balanced internet connectivity with a single set of Bigleaf public IPs that work across ALL of your internet pipes. DIA Fiber, Broadband, and 4G/5G cellular can all be combined to help ensure that “our internet is down” never has to be a problem again.
As far as the cost of a secondary internet circuit goes, T-Mobile’s 5G-Cellular Small Business Internet service starts at only $35/mo and has speeds up to 180Mbps up and down.
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In the realm of cybersecurity and network reliability, ensuring uninterrupted internet connectivity is paramount for businesses. The concept of redundant internet connections, while seemingly straightforward, introduces a layer of complexity that can be daunting for IT professionals. The use of multiple internet pipes, each with its own set of public IP addresses, can lead to complications in whitelisting and fail-over configurations, particularly for cloud services and VPN tunnels.
Bigleaf offers a streamlined solution to this problem by providing a router that can intelligently load-balance up to four internet connections, presenting a single set of public IPs to the network. This not only simplifies the configuration process but also ensures that businesses remain online even if one or more of their internet connections fail. The integration of DIA Fiber, Broadband, and 4G/5G cellular connections further enhances reliability, making it a robust solution for businesses of all sizes.
For those looking to implement similar solutions on a Linux-based system, the following commands and tools can be invaluable:
1. Network Interface Configuration: Use `nmcli` or `ifconfig` to configure multiple network interfaces.
sudo nmcli connection add type ethernet con-name eth1 ifname eth1 sudo nmcli connection modify eth1 ipv4.method manual ipv4.addresses 192.168.1.2/24 ipv4.gateway 192.168.1.1
sudo nmcli connection up eth1
2. Load Balancing with IPRoute2: Utilize `iproute2` to set up load balancing across multiple interfaces.
sudo ip route add default scope global nexthop via 192.168.1.1 dev eth1 weight 1 nexthop via 192.168.2.1 dev eth2 weight 1
3. Failover with Keepalived: Implement failover using Keepalived to ensure high availability.
sudo apt-get install keepalived
sudo nano /etc/keepalived/keepalived.conf
Example configuration:
vrrp_instance VI_1 { state MASTER interface eth1 virtual_router_id 51 priority 100 advert_int 1 authentication { auth_type PASS auth_pass 1234 } virtual_ipaddress { 192.168.1.100 } }
4. Monitoring with Nagios: Set up Nagios to monitor network interfaces and alert on failures.
sudo apt-get install nagios3
sudo nano /etc/nagios3/conf.d/contacts_nagios2.cfg
For further reading and resources, consider the following URLs:
– Bigleaf Networks: https://www.bigleaf.net/
– T-Mobile Business Internet: https://www.t-mobile.com/business/internet
– Linux IPRoute2 Documentation: https://linux.die.net/man/8/ip
– Keepalived Documentation: https://www.keepalived.org/documentation.html)
– Nagios Core Documentation: https://assets.nagios.com/downloads/nagioscore/docs/nagioscore/4/en/
In conclusion, the integration of redundant internet connections, coupled with intelligent load balancing and failover mechanisms, is essential for maintaining business continuity in today’s digital landscape. By leveraging tools like Bigleaf and implementing robust Linux-based solutions, businesses can ensure that they remain operational even in the face of internet outages.
References:
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