macosnetwork-programmingwifinetwork-interfacetethering

OSX Link Aggregation for USB tether and WiFi?


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.

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?


Solution

  • 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.