Combine connections using Pi

I'm pretty sure that somewhere on here I read about a way to run a proxy server using a Raspberry Pi on the network and a remote vpn server so that you can combine more than one internet connection.

The trouble is that I can't remember what it was called or where I saw it. A fruitless hour of searching has drawn a blank.

Can anyone help?

Haven't done it myself but google "Raspberry pi proxy server" and you will get links like this one

In reply to a post by hoopla:

I'm pretty sure that somewhere on here I read about a way to run a proxy server using a Raspberry Pi on the network and a remote vpn server so that you can combine more than one internet connection.

The trouble is that I can't remember what it was called or where I saw it. A fruitless hour of searching has drawn a blank.

Can anyone help?

It's certainly possible but depending on the speed of the connections a raspberry pi may struggle.
Also you will need a VPN server in the cloud.

Thanks Dan

In reply to a post by hoopla:

I'm pretty sure that somewhere on here I read about a way to run a proxy server using a Raspberry Pi on the network and a remote vpn server so that you can combine more than one internet connection.

The big questions is; what exactly are you trying to achieve? Do you want some traffic from your LAN to route via your normal gateway and some to route out through the Raspberry Pi over the VPN? It's the word 'combine' that's got me puzzled.

Edited by caffn8me (Fri 05-Feb-21 13:45:44)

Need a bit more info really on what you are looking to achieve and your setup.
I think what you are asking is how to use multiple WAN connections in tandem to either increase speed or add redundancy. If that’s the case there are articles online about using Squid (a widely used Linux proxy server) with multiple WAN links but the ones I saw dated back a long time and it didn’t seem a nice solution. I assume the remote VPN server is to give all the links the same outgoing IP address when the traffic hits the internet by running VPN tunnels over each WAN link and then combining the traffic at the remote end.

If it was me I’d be looking at a hardware solution with a router that could load balance or do failover. I’ve used Draytek kit to do this in the past but there are other good options out there too eg Edgerouter, Mikrotik etc.
Best way to achieve this is with an ISP that would let you bond the connections together but that’s fairly specialist offering.

Are you thinking of OpenMPTCProuter?

You can certainly run it on a RasPi

I recall there's been a couple of threads on here about using it, I don't think either used a Pi though.

Edit - Yep, found these

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/mobilebroadband/f/...

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/general/f/4668406-...

There's also Speedify

https://speedify.com/blog/raspberry-pi-bonding-route...

Edited by Davey_H (Fri 05-Feb-21 18:39:05)

Basically, I currently have a 4G connection with pretty good uplink speeds, but poor downlink and poor ping times.

I should have FTTC in a week or two, which should have decent ping and downlink, but not good uplink speeds.

What I want to explore is some way to combine these. Only interested in better performance: no need for a VPN otherwise.

I have a spare Pi4 and I have a (mostly) spare server in a German hosting centre, running Debian 10. The only worry is that openmptcprouter docs say that "SSH port is changed to 65222 (TCP)" which would be a bit of a pain: a different (non-standard) port is being used for a few things there.

I'm not keen to spend a lot of money on extra hardware for just an experiment.

I think that OpenMPTCRouter was indeed the name I'd forgotten. Can't think how - it's so catchy!

Edited by hoopla (Fri 05-Feb-21 19:56:45)

In reply to a post by Davey_H:

There's also Speedify

https://speedify.com/blog/raspberry-pi-bonding-route...

I'm struggling to make sense of this one.
They say you can use a Pi and that you can have the LAN side connected to the ethernet port, but it says "Note that you can only share over an Ethernet port that is not connected to an internet source. Pick one ethernet card to share with your client or client devices, and it must not be one of the ones that are connected to the internet already."
I've never seen a Pi with more than one ethernet port. Am I missing something?

USB network adapter or wifi on the newer ones?

In reply to a post by FarmerStuart:

USB network adapter or wifi on the newer ones?

Tagged VLANs into a switch? But if the OP knew what tagged VLANs were, then they probably wouldn't be asking questions here

I'll try to make one thing clear. Some of the advice offered previously has been about routers with dual-WAN ports. These are easy to deploy. However what happens with these is that any particular session (e.g. TCP session to fetch a web page) goes over one or other link - both inbound and outbound traffic for that session. This may be useful if there are several people in a household who are using the Internet simultaneously, and to balance their usage between them.

However this *can't* be used to combine bandwidth for a single session (e.g. a single large download), nor to use one link for upload and the other link for download as part of the same session. I think this is why the OP wants some sort of VPN solution, where two VPN connections are connected to some remote VPN node, and traffic is load-balanced between them.

Unfortunately, I don't think this is going to work well.

From my experience, probably the thing most likely to work would be two L2TP sessions with PPP-multilink across them, since this is the same technology used for "bonding" discrete PPP sessions. You need an L2TP termination point at the other end. AAISP offer an L2TP service for £10 per month, but I don't know if it supports multilink. Plus, you need a router which would do L2TP and multilink (possibly their "firebrick" device can do this), and you need to understand how to configure L2TP and multilink.

Maybe some VPN supplier offers a packaged solution for bonding that's easy to deploy. In which case, they'll also advise on what device or software is needed at the client side, to work with their VPN.

But to be honest, whatever you do, I don't think it will work well. You can't really combine two bad links to make one good link. You *can* combine two similar good links to make one good link with twice the throughput. FTTC and 4G have very different characteristics; if you divide your traffic between FTTC and 4G and find performance problems, it will be pretty much impossible to debug. TCP in particular can get very unhappy when packets arrive out-of-order, which will be the case when dividing packets between two links with very different latencies.

I think in this situation, multi-WAN with FTTC as primary and 4G as failover (or FTTC primary for some users and 4G primary for others) is simpler and easier to troubleshoot.