My school uses dual ISPs with some sort of load balancing system (most likely a box made by Cisco). I assume this does wonders for web browsing (which is always pretty fast), but causes havoc with everything else.

Games suddenly lag out after playing fine, large downloads quit for no apparent reason, Skype conversations go quiet for a couple seconds every now and then.

My biggest complaint is the games, I've heard that some games have Dual ISP patches, but I can't find any.

In short, I was wondering if there was a way to bypass the load balancing, so my external IP can stay the same, at least during gaming.

Welcome to the forums, zort!

Unfortunately, I am not too familiar with this, so I will leave it for someone with a little more experience with it. We have plenty of smart people here and I'm sure that someone will be able to point you in the right direction.

Travis

My question is:

Are you teacher or a student at your school?

In other words what are your motives in trying to bypass the load balancing?



Aubrey

I'm a student

Generally, I want to be able to play games with out lagging out, I want to be able to download large files, with out them dropping out on me, and It would be really cool if I could have a Skype conversation that doesn't go silent every few minutes.

The most annoying thing is the games, because there is no way around it. Most large files can be downloaded through a BitTorrent mirror (which is usually faster anyway, and seems to be mostly immune to these problems), and as far as Skype goes, at least the entire call isn't dropped.

I’m not trying to do anything malicious; I just want to play games with out interruption.

Fair enough - but at the college where I teach we have to pay for every byte downloaded so all of those uses would violate our fair use policy and general student user agreement. Exceptions being actual teaching/learning requirements.

Aubrey

I've talked to some of the people working in IT at my school, and my school is not charged based on the amount of data transfer.

I also read the "Technology Use Policy" for my school (as updated on 06/08/2005), it doesn't say anything about gaming or large file downloads. The closest thing it says is "avoid overloading networks with excessive data", which would be impossible to do with only one computer.