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ASUS RT-BE96U and the dreaded dual WAN feature

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I have Cox fiber. Our story starts when I started getting lots of captchas. On every page. Everywhere. Then, I started getting errors with Netflix about being unable to serve content. Then Venmo stopped working, etc, etc. I ran virus scanners, malware scanners, etc. I run Linux, and I am pretty careful with updates and firewalls, so it seemed unlikely, but I thought maybe I had some malware somewhere. However, when I VPN'd to another network, the problems went away. If I used any other device with any other OS, Windows, Android, MacOS, or otherwise, I continued to have problems unless I switched on the VPN.

OK, fine, I thought, I'll try to reset my IP address... but Cox's panoramic rent-a-crap doesn't have the option to do that. Many phone calls and weeks later, I finally was able to get the thing to get a new IP. You may be wondering at this point why I didn't ditch Cox for someone better, say, a snail carrying a thumb drive. Well, we don't get a choice around here. Cox is the only game in town if you want anything except satellite or OTA 10 Mbps internet.

I decided, hey, I'll buy a new router. I was looking at a Wifi 7 setup anyway, so why not splurge a little? I bought a ASUS RT-BE96U after reading what I thought were pretty good reviews online. I set the rent-a-crap aside and resolved to take it back and save a buck or two. I was really happy with the RT-BE96U. It could do separate VLANs for IoT stuff with the ability to prevent those devices from talking to anything else on the network, AiProtection, lots of neat stuff. I searched many, many threads on these forums that helped me not only get back up and running, but also to be nicer to my neighbors as well. Thank you!

But Cox wasn't done with me. Oh, no, my friends, they decided to have multi-day internet outages. I started to miss work. Work is stressful enough without me missing a day and having to catch up on tons of email with people snarling at me that I missed this or that deadline.

I found the dual WAN feature today as I was biting my nails wondering what terror will befall me tomorrow when I am able to get back to work. I understand that especially on the stock firmware, it doesn't work well, in fact I might not be able to get it to work at all, but if I could get the second OTA 10Mbps wireless, I could at least have a backup. But I don't want to give up AiProtection or the other features in order to use it.

So, TL;DR: Are there any alternatives to AiProtection or other features I may be missing if I am somehow able to get dual WAN working?

TIA.

Signed,
An Idiot.
 
As an alternative to missing work when Cox is down have you tried putting your cellphone in mobile hotspot mode and connecting your computer to work that way?

I have done that several times.
 
The cell service I have with Verizon has barely 1 bar anywhere in the county. They were also overcharging me - it was only $10 more per month to get AT&T Internet Air and switch carriers anyway, so I went with that. Now I just need to configure the Asus router. I was thinking of replacing the two-way IPS with Snort running on both interfaces, and Quad9 for DNS. Am I understanding that does the same thing? What would you suggest?
 
So do you have a second ISP or are you using cellular as backup? There are two modes: Dual WAN with load balancing or fail over with fallback. It's been a while since I've run my BE98 Pro as router but fail over with fallback should allow AiProtection to work?
 
If you use the second wan port for the AT&T cellular internet as a backup when Cox goes down (Failover Mode). That should work.
You can also set Quad9 for DNS in your configuration.
If I'm not mistaken you can leave AIProtection on if you want either way.
 
Well, I was hoping for load balancing with a second ISP. Yes, I'm doing this for backup, but if I can get away with load balancing, why not give it a shot? I like solving these kinds of puzzles anyway and building things. Thus why I asked about Quad9 and Snort to replace two-ways IPS and malicious sites blocking, to replace those features in AiProtect. As I understand it, the Trend Micro stuff uses a proprietary database for their malicious site blocking and two-way IPS. Is there an equivalent that would work? I wouldn't even mind writing or modifying the code in C, though I doubt I'd be very good at it.
 

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