Draytek Load balancing performance

[JoeJoe]

Looking at using either pfense or a Draytek router to load balance several DSL lines for my home, I want to have a single network.

I can only get DSL lines as fast as 1.5 Mbps down / 896Kbps up, so I have 2 lines right now. Dryatek told me that they can all be in the same ISP subnet.

How would a draytek multiwan router work if I tried to stream Netflix on two devices?
Would it split the Netflix streams over the two DSL connections, is it smart enough to do that? (assuming they started at two different times)

Or if I had one Netflix stream using almost all the WAN1 bandwidth, would it send all other general web/ftp data to WAN2?

Is the router smart enough to keep SSL/bank connections to a single WAN connection? What about PS3 gaming connections?

If not, do I have to implement individual rules for these scenarios, such as Rokubox uses WAN1 and PS3 uses WAN2?

Do any of the Draytek router support static-DHCP?

Do any of the Draytek support fully open Dynamic DNS and not just a small drop down list of a few companies?

thanks!

 

[ogreene]

Hi,

I have a Draytek 2920n and have been very happy with it. All the features I have used work well and are easy to use.

I have not used the dual WAN capability but from the documentation and web interface it explains how to do this very well and seems flexible. I have used the VPN facility from and to my iPhone into my network and this also works perfectly both direct IP or using dynamicdns..

Dynamic dns gives a drop-down list of 9 popular providers with no way to add a new one. You can set upto 3 providers.

With regards the load balancing, they have several options(I have not tried these) that suggest you can set the WAN's in fail-over, or load balacing depending on Line-speed, or user defined upload or download threshholds. They also allow routing of certain protocols over specific LANS or both.

For PS3 you could setup a static route to send all traffic over either WAN 1, WAN 2 or the LAN based on it's IP.

For Netflix, the load balancing would come into effect. I think they also have a round-robin option as well as the stuff I mentioned above.

The router supports static (Bind-IP) and the setup of upto 2 DHCP servers.

Have not seen a way to force SSL to a specific WAN interface, but have not looked that hard.

I can ping you over a copy of the manual if that would help and if I can find it

Hope this helps.

 

[JoeJoe]

I'm looking for a router that will load balance dynamically.

Thanks for the bind-ip option info, that's just what I want. Its a bit backwards but it'll work.

I wish the dynamic dns option was more open to other providers such as namecheap.com. or totally open.

I'm used to DD-WRT or Tomato, which offer just about everything... apart from load balancing.

 

[ogreene]

Hi Joe,

As far as I know they do dynamic load balancing to keep both lines evenly loaded. They also offer the option for you to set thresholds for each path < or > xxx kb etc to ensure no line gets overused while the other is free.

Not sure what is missing, but there was a good review on this site of the router about a month ago I think, where they tested this feature. Have a hunt for it on the site and see if it meets your needs.

As for dyndns, well they have 9 providers and it was easy to set up and if you used dyndns.com its also free for upto 4 IP's I think.

Good luck.

 

[JoeJoe]

thanks. I get my 2nd DSL installed this week, I installed pfsense on a PC with their 2.0 beta software. I will see how that goes, then I might try a 29XX router.

I'm also considering using http://us.sharedband.com/ as they are in the same area of the country. The support said any traffic should add no more than 20mS of latency.