OSX Link Aggregation for USB tether and WiFi?

Question

Is this kind of link aggregation even possible?

On a Windows machine, there are several 3rd-party applications which make use of bonding and load balancing multiple network interfaces for increased throughput, such as Connectify Dispatcher, for example. Would it be possible to develop such an app for OSX? Is there already any 3rd-party software which does this on OSX? The closest thing I could find was IPNetRouterX, which I've failed to use for bonding USB and WiFi network interfaces.

I have also tried the following line in OSX's terminal:

sudo networksetup -createBond bond0 en1 en3

...where en1 is my WiFi interface and en3 is my USB network interface, which simply results in:

** Error: The parameters were not valid.

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Likely, there would need to be some sort of Layer 2 "magic glue" to make this in any way a possibility... but primarily being a Windows programmer, I'm not sure if Apple would enjoy allowing that level of programming access, considering how proprietary they like to be...

Any idea what can be done here?

Kosak

Answer 1

gaige thanks for your technical answer but RectangleEquals is not asking how to do Link Aggregation through terminal but

IF Link Aggregation can work for USB, WIFI, or other type of internet connections.

The answer is NO.

Apple didn't created Link Aggregation. It's a separated feature Unix had. Therefore Apple has zero idea how to improve it - nor does it want to spent resource to figure it out because it is not a common enough demand. Even if it wants to give you the feature it will not provide in a regular version of OS X but will provide in a server version and charge you for it.

And there are developers who can do it, by writing a lot of codes - so no free version of such application exist. You can try Connectify Switchboard for OS X.

Chamblee

I'm not really going to quibble with this answer 6 years on, but my "technical answer" actually did answer the question by describing how to determine if the link aggregation can be done on a specific port. And, I did actually say that (at least on my machine) the hardwired ethernet devices were the only ones that supported bonding. – Aggrandize

Answer 2

There are options to networksetup to tell you whether the OS can bond a particular port or not. To do so, you need to hand it a "hardware port", which you can find by using:

networksetup -listallhardwareports

Each of those, in turn, can be queried using

networksetup -isbondsupported <HW Port Name>

Bonded networks are set up using the networksetup port name, not the kernel interface name, so if you were to bond two ethernet networks, you would do so like this:

networksetup -createBond myBondedNet 'Ethernet 1' 'Ethernet 2'

Querying the ports on my 2009 MacPro running 10.9, I find only the hardware ethernet ports to respond YES to the -isbondsupported inquiry.

Note that I didn't have to have the port operational in order for -isbondsupported to return YES, so in my case both of my ethernets responded YES even though only one is currently connected.

Aggrandize

Answer 3

I found that there is actually no decent way of accomplishing this, thanks to the way that networking is handled via separate interfaces. Although it would be possible to use two separate interfaces to connect to the same remote data source, it would require kernel-level programming skills to get these two interfaces working in unison... And the packets returned through each separate interface would be handled VERY differently, and the network packets would be far too out of sync with each other... So even then, if you were to create some sort of magic bridge to handle all of these situations and somehow use two separate interfaces to pull the same synchronous data, it would end up being (best case scenario) the exact same speed -- but likely SLOWER -- than with just one network interface. Far too much hassle for almost zero benefit.

Kosak