Dual / Multi-WAN, possible to get best of both worlds?
-
Let's start of with laying down the facts.. I'm a complete newbie when it comes to pfSense to begin with, but before I start digging into various possible solutions and configurations pfSense might have to offer I'd want to know whether my imagined configuration is possible achieve in the first place.
Here is the thing, we've got two internet connections to our house, one for my parents living upstairs and one of me living downstairs from two different internet service providers.
They've got a optical fiber connection from "Homebase" providing 25/25mbit with response times at around 1-10ms when communicating with servers inside Norway, and normally 30-60ms when communicating with servers around in Europe and 80-120ms when communicating with servers around the world. That's the real magic and benefit from optical fiber, you get some really good and stable connections with low ping.
I on the other hand is sitting on a coaxial connecting run by "Get" providing 120/10mbit with response times at around 45-70ms when communicating within Norway, and normally 70-100ms when communicating with servers around Europe and anything from 120-300ms when communicating with servers around the world. This connection is awesome for one thing and that's providing good download speeds for a great price (I get dealer prices at work) but the ping is less than ideal compared to our optical fiber connection as well as the uploads being limited to 10mbit is a real pain when trying to stream HD, as well as uploading 1080P on the web and various things at the same time.
This all bring us this topic, as we would love to combined the benefit of both connections using a pfSense firewall / router solution. What we want to do is relaying on our optical fiber connection as our main connection to the internet as 25/25mbit is plenty for anything other than heavy downloads, and the low ping is beneficial for about anything we do on whether it's online gaming, remote connections etc.. But at the same time we would love to be able to utilise the 120mbit download speeds from the coaxial connection when using download managers such as torrent-clients, Blizzard downloader etc.. Would it be possible to achieve all this simply by replacing our Cisco RV 220W Small Business routers with a pfSense setup configured with Dual / Multi-WAN setup?
-
pfsense can do policy based routing to different gateways. So you need to say pfsense where to route which (destination/source) IP or port.
So lets assume this:
Any https and https traffic should be routed through your optical connection then you need to create a firewall rule which has the port 80 nd 443 as destination and as Gateway the optical connection.Other traffic which is using other ports should use the other gateway.
The same can be done with IP addresses.You will get problems if you have an http download - because as you said this should be done with the cable connection but in general you want that for port 80 should be on the optical interface.
It could be another possiblity if you have one "gameing computer" and you route all its traffic through one gateway and all traffic from your laptop through another gateway.
Hope this will help you in any way. :)