Dual WAN with 1:0 Ratio

[Rosco]

Apologize in advance for the noob question/possibly repost. I search around on google without getting an answer that I could make sense of, so here I am.

Long story short, the apartment building I moved into has built-in internet, but it would only provide users with private IP addresses. (No direct global access.) I needed a global IP for my server's DDNS, so that was a no go, and I got my own ISP to bring a line in for me. It just hit me that I still have the built-in line sitting there doing nothing, so I thought about setting up a dual WAN (Asus AC68U) but it sounds like they're hit or miss.

This is what I'm thinking at this point. Is it possible for me to set the load balancing ration to 1:0, so it'll by default use only the primary source, but allow me to set certain specific IPs on the network to use the second source just to free up some network chatter. For example, if my Netflix is streaming hard on the primary, it doesn't need to be interrupted by my wife flipping on Spotify, so it could be using the secondary. That said, I don't really want anything to use the secondary unless I explicitly set it to.

Is this possible, or just a pipe dream? Or would I need to just set it to 100:1 or something like that? Or should I just not bother...

Thanks for your insights up front!

 

[Rosco]

So... No input then?

 

[Andyf66]

At that point, do you even need to be doing load balancing with a specific device as such? You could have two separate gateways on your LAN, each with its own IP address. By selectively giving different devices the different gateway IPs you are manually/statically load balancing.

Obviously you'd need to be careful with DHCP etc, by having it turned off on one of the gateways for example.

 

[Rosco]

Oh, ok.
That method hadn't occurred to me. I also don't know how to do that, so I'll have to look it up. It sounds like a better idea though.

Can this be done with my single router? I already manage my DHCP with all known devices having assigned IP addresses, but I've never monkey'd around with gateway settings.

 

[Andyf66]

The top solution outlined here is how I'd propose doing it. Slight complication here is that one of your connections is already a private IP address as it goes through some router external to you.

https://superuser.com/questions/635515/two-internet-connections-two-routers-one-network

You might be able to plug that existing connection directly into the lan side of the new connections router and just make sure your 'combined' lan uses the same range. If that doesn't work you might need to add a new cheap router onto the existing connection and that would then be double-natte. Advantage of that is that you have complete control of the local up address range.

 

[Samir]

I would actually use a dual-wan router for a scenario like this. You can have your ddns as well as two wan connections that the router will maximize the use of. Depending on the bandwidth available in both connections, you can even use an older Cisco rv082/16 (v1 or v2) if the bandwidth is below 40Mbps. That's the fastest I ever got a single wan to go, although 3 x 25Mbps connections did yield 75Mbps to the lan.

 

[davidh44]

This is an interesting idea as I'm looking to achieve the same thing, but does anyone with Asus Dual WAN load balance experience know if a 1:0 ratio is even possible or accepted? I don't think so.

 

[Samir]

Depending on the different features, you may be able to get the connection to a particular destination go through a particular wan using static routes.

 

[davidh44]

Depending on the different features, you may be able to get the connection to a particular destination go through a particular wan using static routes.

There is a setting for that, but it is limited to 32 static routes. And any device that isn't assigned a static route would have non-functioning Internet access due to Asus' broken load balancing feature.

 

[Samir]

Ah, so it's broken then. Yeah, not much you can do with that then. But having the static routes would allow you to point certain devices to certain targets then. Not 'load balancing' per se, but maybe good enough to work.

FWIW, my old rv016 would load balance up to 7 wans with 40Mbs each. I never tried to max it out, but I know it hit 75Mbs down using 3x 25Mbps links back in the day.

The king of multi-wan has always been peplink as their products are literally made for this.

 

[coxhaus]

If your app is dependent on DDNS then I would think the load balancing would break. IF you manually set up internet connections and apps which would work on private IP address then I don't why you could not use both internet pipes as long as you had a dual WAN router. You just need to segment the traffic on the router for each internet pipe.

 

[davidh44]

To answer the original poster's question, you can't set a load balance ratio with 0 as one of the numbers. And with Merlin's firmware, the # of static dual wan routes you can set is increased from 32 to 64 (the actual number allowed is under 60...going over that I get no error message but nothing is saved).