Cisco 2501 Load Balance ????

[Comga199]

Question: Can I load balance two T1 lines on a Cisco 2501 Router. If so, how.

Specifics:
* Two sites: Site#1 and Site#2
* Two point2poing T1 lines going to and from both ends.
* Site #1 has a cisco 2501 and site#2 also has a cisco 2501 router.

Goal: Load balance the lines or just make both available to each site.

 

[baddos]

Try this. This tells your route to loadbalance per packet across your two t1 lines.
config t
ip cef
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 x.x.x.1 !ip of router t1 #1
ip route 0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 x.x.x.2 !ip of route t1 #2
interface FastEthernet0/0
description To Office FastEthernet
ip load-sharing per-packet
exit
exit

 

[Comga199]

thanks for the quick response baddos.

I made an attempt to try this on my 2501 router yesterday but I think the IOS is outdated because I dont have the CEF feature. You don't happen to know which IOS version I need to update to do you?

 

[baddos]

Not sure... Anything IOS 12 should do it though.

 

[Rucus1]

He may not have enough ram/flash in his 2501 to run an image that has CEF in it. He should be able to load balance anyway it will just load balance on a per destination basis.

 

[Comga199]

The image version I'm running is 12.2(1). Where can i get the latest version if there is one?

 

[vammu]

If you remove ip route-cache on serial interfaces it would switch traffic packet by packet. You need to do this on bot sides of the routers.

rtr1# rtr2#
int s 0 int s 0
no ip route-cache no ip route-cache
int s 1 int s 1
no ip route-cache no ip route-cache

Now if you look at the interfaces sho int s0, s1
both packet rates will be very close to being identical.
Process switching is ok, because, ethernet is 10 or 100MB, and T-1s are only 1.54+1.54 = 3MB, and the router can handle it.

ammu