Ask Slashdot: Best Connect Scheme For a 2-ISP Household?

c_petras writes "I just had DSL installed (a 19,000 ft run — Woo Hoo!) to act as a backup to my regional WiFi connection. How should I configure my home network so I don't have to swap the cable from one ISP's router to the other to maintain a good connection? Is it as simple as getting another router and plugging the two ISPs in? Is there a more elegant solution that would not require the use of three separate boxes and associated wall warts?"

Comments

What I did.

[grub]

I did this a couple of years ago with DSL and cable. My choice was to use OpenBSD's Equal-Cost Multipath Routing. I've seen other hardware devices that accept two broadband connections but the OpenBSD option was much more elegant and allowed some good granularity in traffic control (ie.: traffic to my cable ISP's billing page may as well go through the cable connection)

I had a couple of lines in pf.conf as so:

table <route_cable> persist file "/etc/route_cable"
table <route_dsl> persist file "/etc/route_dsl"

then would force the network ranges/IPs contained through the appropriate interface.

I dumped the DSL about a year ago but this worked very well for me. YMMV. Mail me if you'd like more info/tips.

Re:What I did.

[grub]

Oh I should note that this was pretty basic load sharing (I won't grace it with the term "load balancing") not failover.
A script would ping out through each interface and if one went down all traffic was rerouted out the other so failure of one link didn't botch things up.

Re:What I did.

[Bastardchyld]

I recommend pfSense 2.0 RC3 to be specific. It has a new ability to use Multiple WANs, you can even weight them based on which has a better connectivity and balance traffic over both. Giving you load balancing and failover between both connections.

Re:What I did.

[pz]

I'm not the highly informative poster above, but can readily speculate justifications nevertheless: (1) reliability, reliability, reliability, (2) cost differential between the two services during different times of the day or days of the week, (3) to maximize available bandwidth if one or the other connection bogs down from one's neighbor, (4) to be able to tell one or the other service to frell off on a moment's notice, (5) to be able to load down one ISP's connection, say with a large file transfer, and have the local network still remain responsive by automatically switching everything else to the other ISP, etc.

I've implemented a related, but certainly not identical, system in my home with two wireless APs running two independent networks feeding a single cable connection. Robustness was the primary motivation.

Re:What I did.

[wolrahnaes]

Shitty service.

A few years ago I lived in a town called Wellington, Ohio. The LEC in the area was Verizon (now Frontier) who offered a DSL service that was officially supposed to be around 3m/768k but usually barely beat 2m/512k and would go entirely down (signal loss at the modem or no PPPoE response) for hours at a time multiple times per month. My roommate and I tried multiple modems including the Verizon-provided Westell, a Cisco 675, a few Motorolas, and an Edgemarc 200AW with no change, nor did installing a direct 35 foot Cat5e link from the telco demarc to the modem, entirely disconnecting the in-house wiring (we were cell-only and worked at a VoIP company so we had no interest in POTS).

So go to cable, you may say. Enter GLW Broadband. Basically, these guys were a local cable TV provider who did the minimum necessary to keep people mostly happy with their TV in these semi-rural areas. At some point they added broadband internet services, but it's clear that they do not take it seriously. As far as I could tell during my time as a customer of theirs as well as while working with customers of mine who had their internet services, they had a single upstream connection to Time Warner. They were somehow worse than Verizon. The modem would lose sync regularly, when it was up the speed was rarely even the 1.5/768 that it was supposed to be, and more than once static IPs just stopped working altogether and would have to be changed. One of my customers I shared with them was literally a stone's throw down the street from the GLW main office, yet they had an outage which lasted a week which they couldn't figure out. I could have run a standard ethernet cable across the lawn between the offices and it would have been entirely within spec.

There was also a local WiFi ISP, but they wouldn't even offer a non-NATed address so they were right out.

When faced with these options, the only option if you want anything approaching reliability is to get as many as you can afford and hope they're not all sucking at the same time.

Re:What I did.

[next_ghost]

You must have experience in tech support. That's a typical answer to a request, "why do you need that?"

Your lack of imagination doesn't equal someone else's lack of need.

The main problem of tech support is that what people try to do and what they really need tends to be two very different things. When you do tech support or software design, asking "why do you need that?" right in the beginning can save you a lot of pain later caused by lack of imagination and basic knowledge on the client's side.

Re:What router/firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=dual+wan+router

Re:PFsense

[yakatz]

I was about to write pfSense when I saw the parent post, so I will just second it.
I use it at home and at several of my clients, and one of those has dual WANs.

(Full disclosure: I have contributed (code, not money) to pfSense.)

RV042

[Isarian]

The "Cisco" RV042 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124160&Tpk=RV042) supports this, by having two WAN Ethernet ports. Plug them both in and go. Relatively inexpensive at $180, sometimes you can find deals online for them. I say "Cisco" because I think the hardware is just rebranded "Linksys" gear from before the merger.

Re:RV042

[Mr.Ziggy]

I thought the RV042 was going to be the godsend product: relatively cheap for dual-wan support in small offices. Turns out it just sucks.

My *personal* suspicion is it is part of the constant Cisco screwups of everything Linksys, but that's a different conversation.

RV042's run HOT, break, don't auto-switch or auto-detect a network outage like they are supposed to. Installed a bunch in some offices and had to replace all of them.

DO NOT buy the RV042.

Peplink makes a good but expensive dual-wan router which does everything you want and more. It is a larger, more robust office size product with pricing to match. But very good.

Otherwise you are looking at a BSD/Linux roll your own solution. I haven't seen anything good and small with 3 ethernet ports embedded in.

Re:PFSense is a great place to start

[TheRaven64]

Note that with this setup you still have to manually reconnect persistent connections if one ISP goes down. If you need transparent fail-over, then things get a lot more complicated (and expensive!) because you'll need the same IP address (range) from both ISPs.

Re:easy as...rocket science.

[grub]

Convince your home ISPs to play BGP with you... Good luck! :)

Re:What router/firewall?

[ryanov]

The one that my church uses has a 2 WAN option:

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9926/index.html

Not a home class one, but only $260.

Re:dd-wrt

[Anonymous Coward]

DD-WRT was my first thought for something that could do this with out costing a fortune but Mesh Networking isn't even close to what the OP is asking about.

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Dual-WAN_for_simple_round-robin_load_equalization

or

http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Dual_WAN_with_one_as_standby_backup

Re:Multi wan router

[HKcastaway]

I've used PEPlink and they are good.... Recommend them, service was good, though they did bring me one which had a hardware problem.

They have some pretty good load balancing policies, but there was some wacky idea I had which it wouldn't do.

  If someone is looking for clever inbound traffic balancing without BGP google that in week or so... actually it is something similar to my DNS racing... (sorry my blog is currently down).

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

There are a few dual-WAN routers

[BenEnglishAtHome]

At home, I have both cable and DSL. I use a Vigor2930N from DrayTek.

Works like a charm.

There have been other mentions of a Cisco/Linksys product (the 104, I believe) but I went with the Draytek because I wanted integrated wireless, too.

Re:Multi-WAN

[zugmeister]

I've used the Cisco/Linksys RV042 to good effect. You can tell it what speed your connections are and let it do a weighted round robin load balance type thing or just set one connection as failover if the primary goes down. Small, quiet and will run you about $150.

You won't get what you think....

[EriktheGreen]

If what you're looking for is A) Fail-over, so if one ISP or line is down you use the other or B) The ability to reach selected IP addresses via one ISP or the other, a dual WAN setup will work for you using one of the dual WAN setups people have mentioned. They're basically hacks that masquerade your desktop behind a public IP address from whichever provider you happen to be using at any moment. They don't allow asymmetric traffic (can't send packets out one ISP and receive via the other ISP) and they'll possibly screw up any security protocol or site that expects to see packets coming from a single IP and port address. This is handy, but only slightly more convenient than moving the cable yourself and re-issuing a DHCP request. Forget about aggregating bandwidth, you won't get that.

If you're thinking that hooking up both ISPs to a router will let you use whichever one is faster for any site when you click on it, you can't do that without a ton of work (and for the most part without being an ISP). The problem is that although a routing protocol exists on the global internet that would let your router figure out which path is best to each network prefix, to use it you have to have your own routing block (an aggregate of multiple network addresses) to announce to the world (which you can't get) and you have to have a router capable of holding and processing the global BGP table in real time... you don't have this.

If only all our home routers could speak a multi path routing protocol with low overhead, every single packet we sent would take the best path to its destination, all our computers would automatically fail over to other connections, we could add bandwidth by plugging in another wire, we could add and remove bandwidth in real time as needed, and we could migrate between internet providers without re-numbering our IP addresses. Things like mobile apps would be much easier to write.. no need to use a central server to pass data to a mobile, just send the packets to its IP and the routing protocol would send them on to wherever it's connected in the net.

I look forward to the day when the Internets evolve to permit multiple pathing for data in real time. Too bad technological development of Internet protocols seems to have slowed and become heavily political.

Erik

Re:PFSense is a great place to start

[bunny.rabbit.3]

I second this choice. I used pfSense in a multi-WAN corporate solution. I had fast & cheap cable for common users which failed over to a 3xT1, which was normally reserved for server traffic. Before the cable, we had DSL that was about the same speed as the T1 and toyed with round robin load balancing. Eventually, I convinced my brother to switch to this solution for his home network. He manually switched between 2 providers that both had 5 GB limits each month. This worked flawlessly until he upgraded to a better provider 2 years later.

Re:What router/firewall?

[TooMuchToDo]

Get a CradlePoint router. I manage 20+ of them remotely, and they'll load balance/failover to any number of connections based on how many ethernet ports the device has. We're using the MBR1400, which has 5 USB ports for multiple cellular/wimax adapters, but also has 5 ethernet ports, which can be configured in any number of lan/wan interfaces. It also does ping tests across the devices you're using so you really know when the connection is down (instead of relying on local link status). Failover, load balancing of WAN links, all for $320.

http://www.cradlepoint.com/products/mbr1400-mission-critical-broadband-router

Disclaimer: Just a very satisfied customer, no other relation.