RT-AC88U Load Balance dual WAN

[awad212]

Hello everyone,

I have an Asus RT-AC88U that i was using the factory firmware and im using it with Dual WAN load balance 1:1. I have been having issues with normal internet usage and connectivity. When i go to access my nest thermostat or my Arlo security camera apps through the phone they start to hang as if the internet is really slow. However when i add a routing rule for my PC to use all incoming and outgoing traffic on the primary WAN, it seems fine however it is defeating the purpose of having a load balance. it is as if the router is freaking out when it sees 2 WAN connections. I also just upgraded to the merlin 384.6 and did a complete new setup however im still experiencing this issue.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

I tried it on mine assigning devices to a particular ISP to prevent connection loss and even that didn't hold well causing drops when it tried moving clients over to the other provider. I gave up on dual wan as it caused me too many problems. Now I just move the cables from one router to the other if my primary ISP goes down.

 

[agilani]

What is your setup like? What is the primary link and the backup link? Have you tested latency on both? Ran a speedtest on both? And without bgp any dual wan setup with both wan connections live would be limited to outgoing traffic. I'm not sure how ddns would work on two wan connections without static ip addresses and dns entries. Most likely it won't....especially for any devices that are using upnp.

Remember you phones is considered an incoming device. It is going out of your mobile phone provider internet and incoming to your home ISP provider.

 

[Gregory Phillips]

My primary ISP is comcast 75Mbps cable and the secondary is AT&T 6Mbps VDSL and for the most part I ran load balancing with both connected but I forget the ratio I used. This worked okay unless I was playing a game at which time my client would lose its connection when the router tried shifting traffic off to AT&T even though I'd set my pc to use cable only.

 

[awad212]

I have 1 modem that has comcast 1GB speed which im getting around 900Mb/sec and my second comcast modem which im trying to use for my servers is 300Mb/sec. I would like to have all devices under one network but keep the servers on the second modem.if there is another way to accomplish this im all ears.

 

[agilani]

the problem is that without using something like bgp with your own as# you are pretty much going to be limited to using the bandwidth for download/outbound connections only. Meaning the router is going to nat packets behind the dhcp wan address for each interface. That may be fine for outgoing requests and responses.

With traffic that is inbound however, nat is not your only issue. You are setting up a upnp listening ports on the wan addresses. The device would then also need to register itself with a 3rd party service and/or dns with two different dhcp based wan addresses. If you have static addresses, you can setup port forwarding and nat the same device behind both wan connections and either access them by IP or setup dns entries for both. Not very likely given upnp devices like cameras however.


You may be better off using active/passive setup. That way your router can and is only registering the inbound connection to a single wan ip and dns entry. During a failover, the router registers the new dns entry in dyndns and the same port forwarding takes effect. A much simpler setup.

With bgp you would have your own block of addresses and you would then use your AS# and broadcast it to both providers instead of using a dhcp address from them. That way the traffic can take multiple paths over different providers. But the ip addresses would be the same regardless of what path to your gear. Not something typically setup in a home environment.

 

[ApexRon]

I have 1 modem that has comcast 1GB speed which im getting around 900Mb/sec and my second comcast modem which im trying to use for my servers is 300Mb/sec. I would like to have all devices under one network but keep the servers on the second modem.if there is another way to accomplish this im all ears.

I do not believe you can achieve load balancing with two connections of two different speeds. Subdivide your home network into CIDR networks. Then I would assign static IP addresses to your servers in a CIDR network, configure DHCP to not use the server CIDR network, and then configure static routes such that the server CIDR network uses the gateway of your slower connection.

 

[ourcontact]

I do not believe you can achieve load balancing with two connections of two different speeds. Subdivide your home network into CIDR networks. Then I would assign static IP addresses to your servers in a CIDR network, configure DHCP to not use the server CIDR network, and then configure static routes such that the server CIDR network uses the gateway of your slower connection.

Can you provide a little more information on how you think this can be configured. I have the same basic set up: Cable 100Mb/s 1TB cap, & Uverse DSL 6Mb/s Unlimited

Cable Modem (supports 1 mac DHCP Public address) - 68UWan-providing DHCP to LAN1 & Wireless SSIDA 192.168.1.0/24
DSL Router-providing DHCP to LAN2 and SSIDB 192.168.2.0/24- 68U-LANp1 as failover WAN

On OpenWRT I had this setup working just fine with Load Balance but had the ability to set rules per device or service to use always us Wan1 or Wan2 unless failed then use the other.
While per service is the preferred method - fast for user impacting, Slow for background, especially large transfers. I am ok with being limited to selecting WAN per device and pushing all large transfers to specific VMs and systems that run non interactive jobs.
I expected I could do same here, but I want to keep all the analytics and AIProtect features so I am using Failovermode.

Unfortunately the failover is Cold, so I am not able to set routing rules and default routes to 192.168.2. gateway.

I want to keep DHCP on for both routers serving their own domain, primarily for wireless devices that may use SSIDA or SSIDB so I don't want to fully bridge the two networks.
I am ok losing automatic Failover mode so I think I want to Set 68U LANp1 as isolated VLAN and configure routing rules to send 192.168.2.0 to LANp1

Hopefully I described this correctly, I had a good handle on how to configure just about any crazy configurations in OpenWRT, yes, Luci/GUI was a big help setting up VLANs, as it seems this will be CLI not GUI I would appreciate any assistance.

FYI - I would have stayed on OpenWRT but had WiFi radio performance issues and it seemed like the 68U (reconfigured T-Mobile Cellspot TM-AC1900 flashed to Asus RT-AC68U) would be a great improvement - and it has been for WiFi, I also wanted to be able to use the analytics as I was struggling with that and ASUS is working great there.

 

[ApexRon]

Can you provide a little more information on how you think this can be configured. I have the same basic set up: Cable 100Mb/s 1TB cap, & Uverse DSL 6Mb/s Unlimited

Cable Modem (supports 1 mac DHCP Public address) - 68UWan-providing DHCP to LAN1 & Wireless SSIDA 192.168.1.0/24
DSL Router-providing DHCP to LAN2 and SSIDB 192.168.2.0/24- 68U-LANp1 as failover WAN

On OpenWRT I had this setup working just fine with Load Balance but had the ability to set rules per device or service to use always us Wan1 or Wan2 unless failed then use the other.
While per service is the preferred method - fast for user impacting, Slow for background, especially large transfers. I am ok with being limited to selecting WAN per device and pushing all large transfers to specific VMs and systems that run non interactive jobs.
I expected I could do same here, but I want to keep all the analytics and AIProtect features so I am using Failovermode.

Unfortunately the failover is Cold, so I am not able to set routing rules and default routes to 192.168.2. gateway.

I want to keep DHCP on for both routers serving their own domain, primarily for wireless devices that may use SSIDA or SSIDB so I don't want to fully bridge the two networks.
I am ok losing automatic Failover mode so I think I want to Set 68U LANp1 as isolated VLAN and configure routing rules to send 192.168.2.0 to LANp1

Hopefully I described this correctly, I had a good handle on how to configure just about any crazy configurations in OpenWRT, yes, Luci/GUI was a big help setting up VLANs, as it seems this will be CLI not GUI I would appreciate any assistance.

FYI - I would have stayed on OpenWRT but had WiFi radio performance issues and it seemed like the 68U (reconfigured T-Mobile Cellspot TM-AC1900 flashed to Asus RT-AC68U) would be a great improvement - and it has been for WiFi, I also wanted to be able to use the analytics as I was struggling with that and ASUS is working great there.

ourcontact: In my opinion, ASUS routers make an excellent router product for SOHO (small office/home office) and home use where a single network is used. When requirements go beyond basic SOHO you have the option to add more hardware devices or move to a more sophisticated product. Adding more hardware devices to accommodate the requirements may be economical but if multiple manufacturers are involved, interoperability issues could arise. Having designed networks using Cisco products, I can say that your requirements would be easy to configure using a single router. However, I have been retired for eight years and am no longer familiar with any of their product line or capabilities to make any specific recommendations.

Another consideration is just to use two routers, just make sure that the routers are using different WiFi channels.

Failover is great on paper but in reality there are many ways for a WAN connection to 'break' for which most failover don't handle.

 

[ourcontact]

Thanks, this is a SOHO env, and hardware/electrical budget doesn't really afford using Enterprise hardware.

For many reasons I have had access to multiWan links for years, decades ago I used a small dedicated multiWan device, and prior to switching to the 68U I had been using mwan3 via OpenWRT on a TPLink very successfuly. On paper it looked like the ASUS ecosystem would be a great resource, and my Wifi connectivity as well as device/traffic monitoring has imporved. I am just learning the env and documentation seems somewhat limited. Past working through this WAN situation (and a DNS issue where IOS seems ignore FQDN of the "Lan domain" ) I'be been able to get everything else working fairly well - VLANs, link aggregation trunk to Nas, Internet only access for wireless IoT& "smart" devices (eventually need to work on hardwired) , VPN access into home network from Internet, and host based VPN where needed.

I understand that there are many ways to manage this, although the ASUS is where I am now, and I am sure I will eventualy figure it out. Appreciate any mentoring on setting up VLAN, bridge, firewall, etc. to configure this second network.