Outbound Load Balancing poll

Perry · Apr 18, 2008, 8:23 AM

Sticky connections seems to get stock from time to time. When you idle on a page for some time it stop to respond.

default install with 2 dhcp wan
add a load balancing pool
change the gateway on the default lan rule to loadbalanced.

That's how i remember it….

Guest · Apr 18, 2008, 1:40 PM

That sounds almost exactly like the issue we're seeing.

mascaos · Apr 18, 2008, 1:52 PM

I want to use the feature but I just active connection failures, web pages that do not respond, pc that not navigate and waiting time for the vision of the first page long.
At this stage I can not use the function in an optimal way

BigHusky · Apr 18, 2008, 4:17 PM

The main reason we had to stop using it was that the 'monitor IP' was just constantly marking our second WAN connection as down every couple of minutes and causing a constant failover before almost instantly failover again due to recovery.
It cause a lot of havoc with our users.
It was most likely caused by the Comcast Network (latency, network, etc), but it made it impossible to use the feature.
Some of the other products we reviewed had fields to set the Timeout, Check Interval, Health and Recovery Retries that allowed to fine tune the feature based upon various factors.
If something like this could be added or exposed that would most likely solve the issue with items such as latency, etc.

Thanks

BH

aaron · Apr 18, 2008, 4:45 PM

I voted for works fine, but I think I may have misunderstood the poll… I use 2 load balancer failover pools with policy based routing and the setup being discussed seems to be load balancer pools that use the behaviour load balancing. So ooops, sorry.

Rani · Apr 19, 2008, 8:46 PM

i have just installed pfSense 1.2 special for load-balancing and fail-over and seems to me that it is working fine so far. i mention that i have tested my balancer rules several times by unplugging cable from WAN or OPT1 interface and in max. 30 sec. it switched on active route. i have a fiber and an wireless connections with static ips. i followed tutorial from ftp://ftp12.freebsd.org/pub/pfSense/tutorials/outgoing_loadbalancing/outgoing_loadbalancing.pdf. hopes that helps. see u! long live pfSense :P

arzepp · Apr 19, 2008, 9:43 PM

Works fine without the sticky connections, with 8 WAN connections shared between 45 users.
For the HTTPS protocol and sites with IP verification, I force one connection out of the 8 in the firewall rules.

ilko · Apr 20, 2008, 12:48 AM

Works fine for us. pfSense 1.2 with 2 WANs (ADSL)/1LAN.
Using sticky connections because of the VoIP devices.

The only issue we had was with the failover/failback and dead states, hopefully in 1.3 this will be fixed and there will be no need of "dirty" workaround:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,7808.0.html

But I suppose it's not relevant to the issue here.

pfSense is really great, thanks for having it :)

hoba · Apr 20, 2008, 12:57 AM

@ilko:

The only issue we had was with the failover/failback and dead states, hopefully in 1.3 this will be fixed and there will be no need of "dirty" workaround:
http://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,7808.0.html

We are investigating options to kill active states on failed links currently. If it's doable we'll add that feature.

CmdrFenix · Apr 21, 2008, 11:34 AM

I currently use pfSense on a dual circuit customer with static IPs. One is a frac T1 and the other is a Cable circuit. I have load balancing setup and also a rule forcing specific traffic out the cable line. Haven't seen anything with the load balancer marking the secondary line down, but to be safe, I added an addition monitor server to be sure.

hoba · Apr 21, 2008, 11:37 AM

Just for clarification: Loadbalancing itself is working just fine. It's only the "sticky" option from system>advanced that seems to cause issues for some installs. We are trying to gather some information on how many people are using it successfully and how many people are encountering issues with it. And we need some information on the setups of course to further troubleshoot it.

ugur · Apr 22, 2008, 10:57 AM

we use outbound loadbalancing and failover for 4 wan.

all works fine! (no sticky, no squid, no sip).

very easy setup and documents enough with forum for setup.

craigdrown · Apr 28, 2008, 7:04 AM

we've just set up dual WAN on 1.2 final:
with sticky connections on, only one link would work, and half the attempted connections would time out (or so it seems)
turned off sticky connections and all is fine.
Cheers,
Craig

ilko · May 4, 2008, 11:11 PM

@ilko:

Works fine for us. pfSense 1.2 with 2 WANs (ADSL)/1LAN.
Using sticky connections because of the VoIP devices.

Appoligies, just rechecked the settings, I confused sticky connections with the static-port option in Outbound NAT, which was used for the VoIP.

Sticky connections I had to turn off, can't remember the exact issue, but something like no web access when was used.
Can't recreate the problem at the moment as we are currently on one connection only.
Sorry for misleading.

@hoba:

We are investigating options to kill active states on failed links currently. If it's doable we'll add that feature.

Thanks for taking it into account.

Regards,
ilko

Wasca · May 4, 2008, 11:50 PM

I voted never use it. I have 2 WANS. One is ADSL2+ the other is 10MB Symmetrical link, both with static IP's

Reasons
1. I'm fairly new to PFSense
2. Was concerned with the issues other have seen

I would like to use it, but when I can be more confident in it.

Keep up the great work guys, and thanks for the poll.

olaf · May 5, 2008, 1:37 PM

Hi:

I was using load-balancing with sticky-connections. I need to change to high-availibility due to intermitent connection drops.

No further investigation due to production environment, but if you need some information, i can activate and debug some information.

I was using it in 1.1 with specific rules for https and ip checking sites. Update to 1.2 (pfsense full update 1.2) for the sticky-connections option.

Thanks for your work…

Best regards,

Olaf

sai · May 6, 2008, 6:10 AM

WAN1 ppoe dsl
WAN2 static cable internet

Loadbalancer works fine, no sticky stuff !

ilko · May 19, 2008, 5:54 PM

We are again on multiWan. I could play with sticky connections option, but what information would be helpful for you to troubleshoot the issue?

Yvan · May 21, 2008, 5:37 PM

I'm setup with multiwan and Sticky connections has disappeared from the page. It has the Load Balancing header and a submit button and nothing in between! I'm on 1.2RC3 I believe

anatak23 · Jun 12, 2008, 3:38 PM

@Yvan:

I'm setup with multiwan and Sticky connections has disappeared from the page. It has the Load Balancing header and a submit button and nothing in between! I'm on 1.2RC3 I believe

Same here, running 1.2-RELEASE (built on Sun Feb 24 17:04:58 EST 2008)