Consumer prices are rising like hell. Government scandal there, here, the list is endless.

The Gokongweis want Petron. You begin to ask, whats the big deal with one company having a different owner? Its just a different set of hands counting the income -wrong.

The Gokongweis are a prominent business family in the Philippines. Some of the businesses they own are Cebu Pacific, Digitel, Robinsons Malls, and Sun Cellular.

Petron is one of the biggest gas companies operating in the Philippines, along with Shell and Caltex.

How is this supposed purchase good news?

A few years ago, the Ramos administration passed the oil deregulation law. The intention was to make the prominent gas companies compete with each other, have a price war, all for the benefit of the consumers. That never happened. For some strange reason, the three biggest gas companies always have pump prices that are nearly identical to each other.

Fast forward today. Lance Gokongwei has expressed his family’s interest in purchasing a significant portion of Petron. If this pushes through, we might actually see the benefits of the oil deregulation law.

The Gokongwei’s have a reputation for introducing a price war in any new business that they enter into. They usually succeed. A good example would be Cebu Pacific, their low cost flights brought air travel to the masses. Another example is Sun Cellular. Sun’s prices are the lowest in the industry. Their unlimited talk time feature made a lot of people consider getting a 2nd cellphone, just to have a Sun line.

At a time where almost everyone is losing hope in our economy, this is certainly good news. I am not a fan of the Gokongweis. I hate the stench at Robinsons Galleria’s parking lot. I hate the network congested message you get from Sun whenever you try to make a call during peak hours. I am a fan however of their business strategy. A price war among the big gas companies is what we need right now. One might argue that, it’s not gonna help much because the international price for oil is going up anyway.

Something is better than nothing. We have to start somewhere.

Example of procrastination. These are not edited pictures.

Tired of lag when you play online? Got 2 DSL lines? This article will show you how to build a low cost, intelligent network device capable of policy based routing through open-source software known as PFsense. This in effect combines your two DSL lines into one. However, unlike some devices which only do load balancing, this setup is intelligent enough to send game traffic to your connection of choice. (it is also capable of load balancing)

We had been using this system for over a year now. This setup was conceived at the height of Method’s campaign at pRO Sakray. Short of physically dividing the shop we played in into two sections, we needed a system to ensure lag free sieges. Through this system we were able to separate game traffic and send it to DSL1, then take browsing and everything else to DSL2.

We had moments that would often make other player’s jaws drop. We had one guy participating in a crucial siege, and we had his significant other seated next to him, killing time by streaming an anime episode. No lag, no effect for the RO players.

For a period of time, I regarded our setup as trivial. In fact, I seldom paid attention to this device as it always worked. Only on a recent trip did I realize how useful this could be for other people.

A few months ago I accompanied Mr. Danny Fong (more popularly known as PAPASPY, a prominent figure in the RF online community) to Davao City for a business trip. We had a client there who was expanding their operations and thus needed our services.

Unfortunately not all hotels there had Internet access. After a few days of being disconnected, I headed out to find a computer shop. Upon finishing my emails, I tried to play DOTA. This was where I learned of a terrible inconvenience: I could not surf in the games section of the café. I had to transfer to the surfing only section whenever I had to open my browser since the two sections, gaming and surfing had two separate DSL lines. Obviously, that was to ensure that online players never complain of lag whenever someone decides to stream the latest installment of their favorite anime on Youtube.

It was only then did I realize that what we were doing back in Manila was not common after all. Hence this article.

To do this, you need the following.

1. Two DSL connections (obviously)
2. An old computer - We used an old Dell optiplex GX200, it had a P3 900mhz processor and 128mb of RDRAM. We bought ours from a surplus dealer at Gilmore Ave. After much haggling, and after reminding the dealer that this unit has RDRAM which made it difficult to upgrade, we got the unit for only 1,200php at no hard drive, no CDROM, and only built in video.
3. 3 LAN cards - You can actually use any PCI based LAN card. (as long as it is recognized by FreeBSD) We decided to get an INTEL based server LAN card because for some weird reason our connection to some counter strike servers are faster. (using INTEL based cards we get 40-50ms connection to a local server compared to the 50-60ms we get when we used the commonly available Realtek based cards). We bought our dual port INTEL server LAN card from tipidpc for only 700php. Our last card is also an INTEL based card, bought for 100php at a surplus store.

The inside of our surplus PC, with the dual port INTEL card still in its plastic packaging. Next picture is the INTEL dual port server adapter (700bucks!)

PFsense uses a heavily modified installation of the FreeBSD Unix operating system to transform any computer into a powerful and intelligent firewall device. Do not let the Unix word scare you, a lot of people are often scared whenever they encounter the words Linux or Unix, as they often associate such terms with typing long obscure words in a command line interface. PFsense is installed using a bootable CD, and is configured through a browser interface just like your common Linksys or Dlink router.

The first step is to physically install the 3 network interface cards into the computer that you are going to use. You then go to the website of PFsense, www.pfsense.org and download the latest ISO image of the live CD installation. Burn that image into a CD, then boot the computer using the bootable CD. Select option 99 to install the PFsense system into the computer. Choose the default options, then reboot when asked.

For a complete guide regarding the installation of PFsense, read the ISO installation how-to.

After rebooting, assign your interfaces:

1. LAN – this is the interface in which all of the computers in your network are connected to, this is usually with an internal IP address.
2. WAN – this is where your primary or default DSL is going to be connected to.
3. OPT1 – this is where your secondary DSL is going to be connected.

Assign an IP for your LAN. We had ours set to 192.168.1.1/24 a common IP for routers in a LAN.

You then use your browser to access the web interface for its initial configuration.

Select “System” from the main menu, and “General Setup” at the drop down menu. Enter your desired name for your device, we named ours as “slimmer” in this case. Also enter the DNS servers to be used, you have two options here, either you specify the DNS servers that you want to use or you can let your primary DSL connection assign you their DNS server. For our case we specified one of our DSL provider’s DNS and one from OpenDNS as our backup.

Next is the configuration of your WAN connection, this is your primary DSL line. For our example we had a PPPoE setup which requires a username and password. There is an option of DHCP for providers who do not require any username and password. Select “Interfaces” then “WAN” from the drop down menu. You enter the DSL details of your provider here.

After you get your primary DSL installed, it is time now to see if your box is working as a router for your LAN. Try browsing a few websites as a test. If all goes well, we can now proceed to the next step.

Physically connect your 2^nd DSL line to the OPT1 interface. We then enable this interface, and configure how this interface communicates with your DSL modem. Go to “Interfaces” then select “OPT1″ from the drop down menu. Enter the details of your 2nd DSL line here.

Check if your PFsense box is able to communicate with your 2^nd DSL provider. Go to “Status” in the main menu, and select “interfaces”. Scroll down to the interface labeled OPT1 the interface should be assigned an IP address from your 2^nd DSL.

Now on to the last part, how to make PFsense take your game traffic and send it to DSL2, and send everything else to DSL1.

Click Firewall in the main menu. Select NAT, then from the tabs presented, select outbound tab. Then select Manual Outbound NAT rule generation. Click save.

Now create an outbound NAT entry for OPT1. Click the plus icon.

Change the interface option from WAN to OPT1, then change the description. Click save. You should have something similar to this.

Next is the most important and final step. We are going to create firewall rules for Pfsense to follow. Firewall rules are essentially a set of conditions that the device compares every packet to. This tells Pfsense, for example, to send counter-strike traffic to DSL2 and Youtube traffic to DSL1.

Rules are processed top first, going down. Meaning if a particular packet matches a rule it is immediately forwarded to the gateway interface according to the said rule. If a packet does not match the first or second rule, PFsense will continue to compare it with every rule until it reaches the bottom. The last rule is usually a catch all rule, meaning packets that did not match any previous rule is sent to the interface specified by this last rule.

We first make our general rule. This rule directs all packets to the WAN interface, essentially DSL1. This rule should at the bottom since rules are processed top first.

Select “Firewall” from the main menu, click “rules” from the drop down list. Select the LAN tab. Then add a new rule:

action: pass
interface: LAN
protocol: any
source: LAN subnet
destination: any
gateway: default

Now we create the rules for game traffic. We shall be using (pRO) Ragnarok Online as an example, as this is a very lag sensitive game.

There are two TCP ports important to Ragnarok Online, port 6900 for login and port 5000 for data.

Add Rule
action: pass
interface: LAN
protocol: TCP
source: LAN subnet
destination: any
destination port: select (other), then specify port 6900
gateway: OPT1

Do another rule for port 5000, just change the port number from 6900 to 5000. Also enter a different description.

Make sure that the last rule is the general rule, since rules are processed from the top going down. Move your game rules up if necessary.

You should have something like the picture below by now. The Ragnarok rules are above the general rule. Thus packets that match the Ragnarok rule are immediately sent to the OPT interface. Any other packets that do not match our Ragnarok rule is processed by the general rule at the bottom, effectively sending everything else to the WAN interface or DSL1

Apply your rules.

Ragnarok traffic on your network should now be sent to OPT1 also known as DSL2. Everything else goes to WAN or DSL1. A user can for example, download and continue to play without lag on the same computer.

This device can sort packets by port number and/or IP address. Just add similar rules for the other games and/or applications you may want to redirect to another DSL connection. You can even have 2, 3 or more OPT ports depending on your needs.

Policy based routing is only one of the many features that PFsense is capable of. It is also capable of bandwidth control, VLAN, and network redundancy. Those are however beyond the scope of this article. For a complete list, go http://www.pfsense.org

PFsense is also not limited to routing DSL connections, other individuals and organizations have been using PFsense to route 10, 20mbps links and above. With capacity only limited by the hardware it is installed at.

Resources:
Policy Based multi-WAN tutorial by Daniel Solsona
PFsense documentation wiki
PFsense website

Editing by GM Simon a.k.a. Innocence of Method

For those interested in minimizing lag for their games using only one DSL line, I will be making another article in a few days.

Too extreme just to avoid lag when playing online? Check out our old toy…

I apologize for any spelling or grammar errors that you may find. I am not a writer, nor is writing a strong point for me. For technical errors, please do not hesitate to post a comment.

1. Technology - These are thoughts, experiences and other crap learned from destroying perfectly good pieces of electronic equipment. No, I won’t be posting rehashes of news already found on the net, this will be strictly stuff that I have dirtied my hands with.
2. Rant - Random ramblings about the inconsistencies of society. Our beloved Filipino society in particular. Why I love this country so much, yet hate its twisted norms of society to the nth degree.
3. Diskarte - Smooth moves in life that usually gives you undue advantage over others without moral complications. Usually impresses the ladies too.

Suggestions on a title for this blog are most welcome. Btw, the reason there is a mouth watering Katsudon meal for my banner is that the said name has been my favorite online persona at various MMORPG’s that I have tried.