ASUS RT-AC88U Dual WAN in Load Balance

[HansoloAU]

If 1 of the wans goes down (is actually disconnected from router) then it will reroute everything to the remaining wan.

However you need to be wary because my 2nd wan is a 4g usb dongle and when it runs out of data quota my isp blocks traffic...it is STILL connected though...so router still directs traffic through it but never gets anything back because its being blocked by isp.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

My primary is Comcast cable and my secondary is AT&T VDSL with a 1tb data cap lol.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

To follow up on our conversation tonight while playing world of warships I was disconnected while in game even though I have the rules set to keep me on the primary WAN. I'll probably just return the router to fail over mode and be done with it, however, web access is very snappy with both enabled.

 

[Adam Siemiginowski]

tonight while playing world of warships I was disconnected while in game even though I have the rules set to keep me on the primary WAN. I'll probably just return the router to fail over mode and be done with it, however, web access is very snappy with both enabled.

Have you experimented further with allowing DUAL WAN load-balancing? Are you still running fail-over mode?

I am considering setting up DUAL WAN load-balancing - BUT my business has about 40 client devices (security cameras, streaming devices, business critical printers...) so if they are going to be constantly losing connection due to IP changes - I cannot risk such a setup.

I would assume I could set each item to work on a specific connection - and they would failover if one connection died - but your posts states that as of April that was not functioning.

(On the other hand - my current 100/10mbps max connection is not sufficient and causing critical items to be crowded out of the network.)

 

[Gregory Phillips]

Have you experimented further with allowing DUAL WAN load-balancing? Are you still running fail-over mode?

I am considering setting up DUAL WAN load-balancing - BUT my business has about 40 client devices (security cameras, streaming devices, business critical printers...) so if they are going to be constantly losing connection due to IP changes - I cannot risk such a setup.

I would assume I could set each item to work on a specific connection - and they would failover if one connection died - but your posts states that as of April that was not functioning.

(On the other hand - my current 100/10mbps max connection is not sufficient and causing critical items to be crowded out of the network.)

I'm running dual wan in failover mode, however, speaking solely for my games I lose connectivity when the changeover occurs. I haven't tried using load balancing again since upgrading to the latest firmware and if I do I'll report back if it goes awry.

 

[peraburek]

Dual-WAN doesn't work as it should, there are many bugs in Dual-WAN, even with the latest firmware
until Asus resolves bugs related with Dual-WAN if you have money go for Synology routers https://www.synology.com/en-us/knowledgebase/SRM/help/SRM/RouterApp/internet_smartwan#t1

 

[DickyDck]

I've recently started playing with the DUAL-WAN using a portable HotSpot as the secondary backup. So here is my issue and maybe you guys will know what I'm doing wrong. I have Xfinity for my primary, running to an Arris cable mode, which then feeds to my AC88U for primary internet. The AC88U acts as my DHCP server. Now in my testing while I have my netgear Mingle hotspot connected to a USB port on the router (it registers and everything) I think there might be an IP Address conflict. Here is what I am thinking... The Arris modem has a public IP, so does the USB Modem/hotspot, no issues there, but the router itself presently has a IP of 192.168.1.1 (default) and I believe so does my Mingle Hotspot which also acts as a DHCP server trying to issue out IPs. So I think there may be a conflict in default gateways between the 2, I'm just not sure how to go about alleviating the issue, since if a client machine happens to get an IP issued from the ASUS, it won't get internet access. Is it just a matter of disabling DHCP on the hotspot and setting the hotspot default IP to something other than 192.168.1.1? For more background, I use the hotspot strictly for this reason, or rather it was obtained strictly for a backup since my home is a "Smart" home and I need internet access for everything that goes one there such as garage doors, locks, and various senors on a home hub system.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

Yes two devices having the same IP address causes a conflict. I ran into a similar issue with dual wan as the second ISP, AT&T, had the same IP as the default on the RT-AC88U so I changed the range on the uverse device which resolved the issue.

 

[DickyDck]

Yes two devices having the same IP address causes a conflict. I ran into a similar issue with dual wan as the second ISP, AT&T, had the same IP as the default on the RT-AC88U so I changed the range on the uverse device which resolved the issue.

Thanks for the input, I thought about doing that having it setup like this...

ASUS IP 192.168.1.1
DHCP Range: 192.168.1.10 - 192.168.1.100

USB Hotspot IP: 192.168.101
DHCP Range: 192.168.1.111 - 192.168.1.254

But I think my issue would be, that my ASUS Router would still be trying to issue DHCP Leases. wouldn't all the clients on the network need to get an IP from the Hotspot to get a good internet connection? I am trying to figure out how to have the router stop issuing DHCP and the hotspot take over when I lose my primary internet connection. Any suggestions? I wish I could draw it out in a viso to show you

 

[Gregory Phillips]

I've never tried using a usb hotspot before so you might want to get input from the other members who's done this before.

 

[DickyDck]

yeah, if it were like your setup with a totally separate ISP provider it would work flawlessly I think. I thought I saw some others in this thread that were using 4g dongles so was hoping they would chime in

 

[DickyDck]

So I think that what I need is an actual USB Dongle and not a hotspot. the USB Donlge modems don't act as DHCP servers, rather if you wanted to use it to share you would plug it into a windows machine and setup internet connection sharing and the PC would be the DHCP Server. Time to find a USB Dongle that works on the FreedomPop network

 

[SystemF]

Go for Asus Merlin, I doubt stock firmware can do what you want. About Dual-WAN, in fail-over mode working perfect for me, but load balance not working at all, tried combined 2 different ISPs (100/100+50/25), and should i get on torrents at least 130-140, but no luck, stuck up to 97-8 Mbps.
And in Load Balance you can't control upload speed, must be adding routing rules, for torrents for utrorent, irc, and other apps, then configure these apps to work with chosen isp and then begin a painful loop.

 

[TelecomDoctor]

Trying two 5 Meg PPPoE DSL's on ASUS routers (Merlin and stock) Failover seems to work. Merlin would not function in Load Balance mode on a RT-AC56U. Stock on AC1900 loads up and appears to work but nothing every goes over the second connection from the router stat info.

Has anyone had better luck?

 

[pointydrip]

I was able to successfully use routing rules to specify devices for each connection in load balancing using the native firmware (not merlin). The key is in reading a very subtle instruction in the routing rules field:
"Please input IP Address or IP Address/Netmask or all"

The key word here is "all".

Source IP is your device ip such as 192.168.1.xxx
Destination IP is set to "all"
Select the WAN you want the traffic to go to.

How ridiculous is that? I must have skipped over reading the field instructions a dozen times trying to route my device IP to the WAN gateway and always failing. On top of that my firmware is currently bugged so I cannot remove rules and would have to factory reset each time I screwed up.

Proof that it is working...
My setup is as follows:

Primary WAN is DSL with a specific WAN IP running at 5mbps with a ping of 200ms
Secondary WAN is Microwave with a seperate WAN IP running at 8mbps and 15ms ping.

My Dual WAN runs on 3:1 because my DSL is unlimited, but microwave is limited to 50Gb/month. I wanted my computer and console to run a bit quicker so they are routed to the secondary WAN (microwave).
Both speed test and IP checks consistently validate that it is working!

I'm probably going to post this elsewhere as I had a very difficult time finding information about this and figured it out by trial and error...happy interneting!

 

[RobDude78]

Glad I found this Site. I am a big fan of the ASUS Routers. I have been replacing Adtrans, Fireboxes, etc..., at my clients for years now with ASUS. Sometimes the GUI’s dont have clear instructions and since every brand has it’s tweaks this has been time consuming. I found my answer rather quickly on here. Thanks,

Rob

 

[HansoloAU]

Can someone please explain the significance of the ratio?

What if you want to split the traffic evenly? 5:5 ???

Why not 9:9 ???

Or for that matter 1:1 ???

BTW, dual wan is working perfectly for me in Load Balance using 3:1 or 5:3 - I would just like to know what difference it makes.

Know this is late to party but in case anyone else is looking for answer to this:-

Say the ratio is 3:1. It will send 3 requests down primary wan then 1 down secondary, then 3 down primary, then 1 down secondary....

So if say primary wan is faster or secondary wan has a smaller data cap (if ISP data caps you) then you are better off sending more data down primary i.e. 5:1

If both primary and secondary are basically the same speed / data cap then you could just do 1:1 so quick alternating or 5:5 hit primary 5 times then secondary 5 times.

 

[princi]

But I don’t believe that applies to streaming video...

and certainly not to VPN connections

 

[akmes]

After a lot of troubleshooting at the client end, I soon realised that it was in fact the dual WAN setup causing the problems. As soon as I disconnected the second WAN, hey presto, everything was singing.

I have the same problem. Only WA solution helps: to set up routing rules and direct clients/DHCP network to use one ISP. When it is unavailable, traffic switches to to another, so failover works. If you use VPN, clients needs to be forwarded to the corresponding ISP as well as the router IP itself.
ASUS support did not help, had tried several countries and multiple requests. . Merlin FW has the same issue. More to this, my old AC-66U worked fine with the same ISPs and settings.

So I did like this:

DHCP start IP 192.168.1.129
DHCP end IP 192.168.1.254 - for guest and new devices

In Dual WAN routing rules: source: 192.168.1.128/25 destination: all -> Secondary WAN

Addresses from 192.168.1.2 and 192.168.1.128 which are used by my regular devices are fixed and some of them are routed to primary WAN, some of them to the secondary one

This is not true load balance, but solves my needs. No firm solution

 

[craigeryjohn]

I wanted to chime in here to offer the easy way I figured out to do Dual WAN without all the page timeouts. I was having so many issues with it taking several attempts for a page to load, and I realized that with load balance, the router would hop back and forth between WANs while processing page requests. But the router was limited to how many routing rules available, and each IP would need 2 rules for both incoming and outgoing. It took a LOT of researching to figure out what was going on and how to prevent it. Here's what I eventually came up with:
With your router as 192.168.0.1, set up DHCP server with starting and ending pools as 192.168.0.2 and 192.168.1.127 192.168.0.127, respectively. The important number here is that 127.
In my manual assignments, I set each device I wanted to be on the secondary WAN to have an IP at higher than .128.
Now your network is essentially split into two; the devices w/ IP 127 and below will get an IP automatically, and those 128 and above you have set manually.
Now add the following 4 routing rules under the Dual Wan tab:

192.168.0.1/25	all	Primary WAN
all	192.168.0.1/25	Primary WAN
192.168.0.128/25	all	Secondary WAN
all	192.168.0.128/25	Secondary WAN

That's it! All DHCP devices will use the primary WAN, and all my manual devices will use secondary. It's not a traditional load balance, but this does keep my 50+ devices on the network running smoothly. I then monitored my device's usage and placed the more data hungry devices on the WAN with the more favorable connection, and you can do this in an approximate ratio that corresponds to the load balance you desire.