Fail Over or Load Balancing and or Link Bonding? 60B WAN1, WAN2, PCMCIA

[#1]

After doing reading on items like peplink products (www.peplink.com) ... multi wan load balancing units which do: Link Aggregation & Load Balance Session Binding / Bonding Lines Fail Over I wasn’t too sure as to how Forigate 60B features work… it says it supports dual WANS, and has a PCMCIA modem but does it provide any features like link aggregation and load balancing or is it only for fail over? Or how does it route traffic; based on service or IP? Does it only activate the PCMCIA link when it sees a WAN failure? I was really hoping I could use a PCMCIA modem (with DDNS) along with my DSL on WAN 1 for failover, load balancing, and link aggregation for increased bandwidth for things like FTP transfers. Can anyone shed some light as to what it can do? Or am I better off with a dedicated product like the PePLink? I really wanted to use AT&T PCMCIA since we get 3G / HSDPA in our area.

[UkWizard]

Actually now i think about this, in the UK our 3G cards get a private IP provided by the ISP' s, NOT a public IP. So unless you have some sort of agreement with your ISP you wouldnt be able to receive incoming connections because of the NAT. You need to have some technical conversations with your future provider BEFORE you buy one. else you could be stuffed when it comes to incoming, even if the fortigate does support it.

[#3]

UK, thats a valid point you have there too.. Come to think of it, I have a Palm Treo 750 phone with a 3G data plan. I can DUN it to my PC for internet teathering... Ill try obtaining an IP address and trying to connect to my laptop using my phones data plan. This should tell me if the ISP can receive an incomming connection; I assume the aircard would work the exact same way. I will try to ping or RDP to my laptop; and see what happens. I will report back after I try it.

[rwpatterson]

If you use a product like LogMeIn (www.logmein.com), you won' t need to know the IP addresses to get to the servers/workstations. Once inside, you can manage the Fortigate from the inside, regardless of outside IP address. It' s 100% free (I like free), and it works very well.

[#5]

I know for a fact that Sprint offers EVDO cards with a public static IP. Virtual IPs work via the modem interface when you do so. Also, with MR6 you can establish an IPSEC VPN and then use the vpn interface IP as a management IP if you need to manage the device externally. In some of my restaurants, that was the only way to get an Internet connection and still be able to manage them with the FM. I' ve actually moved away from the pcmcia cards now that I' ve discovered a company called Accell Networks. It' s still a cellular data card, but the latency and throughput is significantly better. Some of my restaurants that use this are in the 3 - 5 Mb range for speed. Static IPs if you wish and it gives you an Ethernet hand off so you don' t have to do workarounds.