About link load balancing

The link load balancer uses pools to increase your available bandwidth, maximize throughput, and add redundancy. It combines the capacity of multiple external connections and balances the data requests across them proportionately. This is not the same as adding bandwidth shaping policies to mange traffic from applications, see our help topic, About shaping policies. You can only apply this to external connections. It works with traffic generated from services running on the Smoothwall Filter and Firewall itself, such as the Smoothwall Filter or Email relay and supports all external connection types, including dynamic DHCP and PPPoE.

This does not support Bonding whereby multiple connections are presented as one. Bonding requires special equipment at both ends of the connection. However, your ISP might provide this.

Failover

Failover is when one connection goes down, another connection is assigned to take its place. As soon as those failed connections come back online, the Failback reinstates them automatically. You can also set up Failover rules for each pool independently.

If you set the bandwidth values of your external connections incorrectly, their ratios are generated based on those incorrect figures. The Smoothwall Firewall always maximizes the use of any active connection, so they don't limit their available bandwidth, but the distribution of data won't be optimal. Incorrect values also hinder management because they aren’t an accurate representation of available resources.

If your Internet connection prevents our Connection monitoring function from reaching Google’s DNS, you must turn off monitoring. This keeps a connection’s status as "up" even if it is not connected. This means that any data sent down this connection is dropped if the connection is down.