I have had so much trouble with comcast high speed internet that I ordered DSL as a backup a few weeks ago... it has already paid for itself for the next ten years. I would like to acheive 100% uptime. I have an abit IP 35 pro motherboard with two gigabit ethernet connections. The problem is I believe Windows XP only receives data from one connection at a time and will only switch over after one of the connections goes down. The problem is that even during this automatic "failover" there is a few seconds of downtime. Not really a big deal but it screws up my Ninja Trader to IB connection and causes me to have to restart Ninja Trader and IB!!! This is what I want to avoid. Anyone have something set up to acheive this level of redundancy. It looks like I could get a dual WAN router but are there any other solutions anyone can think of?
there's some on here that have discussed this. the search function would help you. try 'hotbrick' in search - it's a load balancing router that allows both sources (dsl/cable) to connnect to the router and balances the stream to you're machine. sorry, about all i know...
i've got some posts on here on it...hotbrick., i got it via tiger direct, i think? i have my cable and dsl come in, they both go through the hotbrick box. when cable dies, it switches within about 30 seconds or so to DSL automatically. (edited to correct when i put in hottrend, duh!)
Thanks for the responses. 30 seconds is worse then what I have now. I am looking for 100% uptime. Even one second down screws up my IB NT connection. I just never want to have to think/worry about internet connections again.
I have a hotbrick,[ it died,] but never used the dual wan capabilities... 30 seconds to failover seems silly, maybe a router that combines the speed of the redundant wan connections would failover instantly. The manual is downloadable from their website, maybe it can be configured to load balance and failover instantly. I don't blame the hotbrick for failing, it died the same time as my DSL had an outage, I'm thinking some spike came down the line and took out something in the telco hardware and my router at the same time, DSL came back up eventually but the router did not... well actually, the router should have been protected against that kind of stuff possibly, if I get it back in service I'll put surge protection on the data lines......
Did you set up the hotbrick properly to failover instead of loadbalance? On the website it seems to imply that the failover is seamless. Please let me know as this was the dual wan router I was going to get if there aren't any other non router solutions to 100% uptime.
ok... I just bought the hot brick. I hope that the 30 second failover time is an isolated incident. Everything I'm reading says the failover should be instantaneous. Hope this works.
I think this issue was discussed prior to this in a thread named "hotbrick". But as I recall, the theory was that in order to fail over from one to the other, there had to be a disconnect, however brief, which of course is enough to disconnect some things. I think in a brief disconnect IB's TWS would be able to reconnect itself quickly. Not so sure about things like charting software....I don't think so. Just an opinion though...I have not used the dual wan router. I do have cable and DSL. I would use DSL if cable went out. I'd have to boot it up so I'd be down for as long as that took (not long). OldTrader
I have an email into hotbrick support. One thing I found is that the hotbrick fails the shields up test at grc.com out of the box. I had to go into the settings and change something, can't recall what it was. If the failover is instantaneous I'm going to get the hotbrick repaired and get a second one for backup, it's a $200 item. If I could find some simple software that I could whitelist url's with I would go with that as a backup but so far I find all this stuff that is for guarding kids from bad sites and whatnot, I just want to type in 3 url's and allow nothing else through, can't find anything...
Try looking up proxy servers. That should be able to block/filter any content you want and allowing in only the "white listed" stuff. It is important to note that it is possible that ANY internet filtering device or software could potentially slow down your trading data if not set up correctly...even if only by a second or two.