Fault tolerant networking using Linux based systems and obsolete hardware

Abstract

Networking at enterprise level is fast, reliable,fault-tolerant, expensive and usually includes a vendor lock-in. This thesis tries to take the good qualities of the enterprise level networking and remove the negative side effects. One possible way to solve the problem is to create a networking solution that uses obsolete hardware and free software to neglect the negative properties of enterprise networking. This kind of solution can be achieved without any need for more system administration knowledge or know-how. Moreover, the thesis conducts an analysis of the previous work done by other people on fault tolerance in networking and offers the author’s own solution implementation. The main result of this thesis is a low-cost solution to Internet service provider and router failover. The tests that were carried out show that it is possible to create a network that, even in the case of ISP and/or router failure, can continue functioning at full speed without significant delays and without disrupting the presently occurring data transmission. The thesis’s work uses computer hardware that has been announced old by its previous owners and software that is open source and readily deployable with a little skill. From a theoretical point of view it should be acknowledged that the author understands that software routing is not as good as hardware routing, however the overall idea was to offer a solution which could theoretically perform as similar as possible to the hardware routing.