Gateway exchanger: does it exist?

Dear All,
in a warehouse of the company where I work we have 2 routers from 2
totally different ISP and with totally different HW (no possibility to
implement HSRP between them) that give connectivity over our wan. (In
reality the situation is a little bit more complicated but it could be
explained in this way).
Actually one of this router is working as main gateway, while the backup
one is switched on but it does nothing, since it has a different IP and
all our clients point to the the IP of the main router.
I'd like to put both the internal interfaces of the 2 routers in 2 very
small different subnets (/30 with 2 available IPs, for example), and
attach them to 2 different network interfaces of a "box".
This "box" should have an internal nic too, with the IP of the current
main router (so I will not have to change the client configurations),
and I'd like to make our clients to use this internal nic as gateway.
The funcion of the "box" is to enable ip forwarding and maintaining a
routing table that point all the outgoing traffic to the main router,
while, in case of a down of it, changing the routing table to point all
the traffic to the backup router.
I proposed to do this with a simple linux "box", maybe with the system
loaded on a solid state disk to be more on safe side in case of HW
failure of the disk, with a script which ping the main router every 20
seconds and, if for 2 consecutive pings it's unreachable, it route the
traffic to the other one.
My boss says that it's "too artisanal" and he'd prefer something
produced by a proper company...
Do you know if something like this exists?

Thanks, Alex

--
GenTLe ...di Varese, provincia.
La mia HP: http://digilander.iol.it/thegentle/index.htm

La vita è fatta anche di ardue scelte, tipo: "Un cuba... O una birra
media???"

On Sat, 10 Oct 2009 20:46:08 +0200, GenTLe wrote:

> My boss says that it's "too artisanal" and he'd prefer something
> produced by a proper company...
> Do you know if something like this exists?

There are a number of reasonably priced Dual WAN routers that support
load balancing and auto-fallover. Search the electronics section of
amazon.com for "dual wan" to get some model numbers.

Here's one from an Italian supplier:
http://www.hotprice.it/index.php?pag...hk=1&Itemid=26

Snowbat wrote:
> There are a number of reasonably priced Dual WAN routers that support
> load balancing and auto-fallover. Search the electronics section of
> amazon.com for "dual wan" to get some model numbers.

Hi Snowbat, thanks for the reply, but this is not appliable for a number
of reasons:
- the situation is a little more tricky. The main router is a L3 switch
stack placed in the local headquarter and reachable from the subsidiary
warehouse (which is on a separate Vlan/subnet) with a WiFi bridge, while
the backup router is on-site in the warehouse.
The failover is in case of a wifi breakdown (this is the reason I need
to ping the router and not the web).
The web connection is given through wan connection to a proxy and a gw
in our datacenter in Vienna (I'm speaking about a _very_ big company,
the one that produces that very famous brown, sparkling, not-alchoolic
and sweet beverage...).
And finally the connection isn't a simple ADSL but an SHDLS which
require different HW and support for MPLS wan.
What you proposed would be good if it was an auto-failover lan router
with 3 nics.

Ciao, Alex

--
GenTLe ...di Varese, provincia.
La mia HP: http://digilander.iol.it/thegentle/index.htm

La vita è fatta anche di ardue scelte, tipo: "Un cuba... O una birra
media???"

David Schwartz wrote:
> Check out the "connectivity check" options on the ZyWALL 70.
> http://www.zyxel.com/guidemo/zw70_de..._b2/index.html
> It can ping the default gateway or ping any address you specify.

Thanks David! I'll give it a look :-)

> Frankly though, I find your boss' objection baffling. Why buy an
> expensive, overly-specialized tool when a totally generic one will do
> the job just as well?

Because he is not a proper technic and he doesn't pay his "solutions"
personally ;-)


--
GenTLe ...di Varese, provincia.
La mia HP: http://digilander.iol.it/thegentle/index.htm

La vita è fatta anche di ardue scelte, tipo: "Un cuba... O una birra
media???"