Malfunctioning Load Balancing Setup
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how can I have problems with conflicting subnets?
If you were still using your cable modem or dsl router for authentication and handing a private IP address to your pfSense WAN interface then there would be a good chance that your WAN and LAN would both be a 192.168.1.* address. This breaks routing. The same could happen if both WANs are in the same subnet.
However if pfSense is handling authentication via PPPoE it will have a public IP.The other, in your case very remote, possibility is that both your WAN connections have the same gateway defined. This will break load balancing if they are not both using PPPoE.
Steve
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Then it's not really a problem, my cable modem gives pfSense a public IP address just as the PPPOE connection.
I am really confused, trying it at home first so I can try pfSense for bigger things, I loved all the possibilities and the interface but I just can't get this load balancing working.
Here is the dashboard screenshot:
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The fact that your screen shot is showing 'unable to check for updates' implies that system DNS may not be working. Can you ping from the pfSense console?
Other than that you may have misconfigured the firewall rule. :-\
Steve
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You've been very helpful so far, I probably messed something up!
Ok, the DNS are both pinging fine and I've figured out even with the load_balancing gateway set to failover mode if the WAN2 is connected it messes all my connectivity to outside the world so I gotta disable "WAN2(Velox)" so I have my Internet working fine.
The "pass" firewall rule is set for the load_balancing gateway group.
load_balancing gateway group is set as follows:
Gateway Priority: WAN1 = tier 1 WAN2 = tier 1
Trigger level: Packet Loss or High Latency.
There is not much else I have configured, only a few port forwardings and that's all!
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Your DNS servers are being correctly assigned to each WAN? You definitely have at least one on each WAN?
Is there anything in the system logs when the connection becomes intermittent?
I assume you've read this already but just in case:
http://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN_2.0Steve
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Ok, seems like it's working… Somewhat
Since the upstream of each connection is capped at 1024Kbps I think it might be using both but still it's far from what I expected since Speedtest usually manages to test it well with pfSense's wan balancing.
What I did change was the MTU on the dsl connection to 1492, that's VERY weird since MTU shouldn't impact the performance so much.
I am trying to figure out how it's working in real-world tests but I can't see the traffic graphic, whenever I click Traffic Graphic under the status menu it takes me back to the router's login page.
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Well if the MTU on the connection is causing dropped packets it could dramatically effect speed.
How are your WANs connected?
Steve
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WAN #1 is connected through a cable modem and has an external IP (DHCP), DNS provided by DHCP
WAN #2 is connected through a DSL modem and also has an external IP (DHCP), DNS provided by DHCPMy results are kinda mixed, while I could max out usenet at around 2.35MB/s which is pretty good considering I could only get about 1.8MB/s on cable-only connection.
Couldn't squeeze more from both connections, when I tried to download a torrent file with huge amount of seeders my usenet speed dropped and all I got get was about 2.4MB/s~2.5MB/s monitored at my own computer. I expected to get near 3.5MB/s at least.
Also tried doing it from two different computers downloading files from usenet and torrents, they shared the 2.5MB/s speed between them(around 1MB/s and 1.5MB/s on the other one) Also my Skype call was very laggy.
I noticed the WAN #2 is not really being used that much, on average of 600Kbps from the traffic graph.
I tested both on Speedtest individually and I got 15.62Mbps on the DSL connection and 18.92Mbps on the cable connection.
I know combining WANs might not be usual for torrents/usenet(I am mostly doing it for testing purposes) but my objective later on is to balance a server that has limited bandwidth and add a backup connection to it.
Talking about this subject, is it possible for pfSense to balance an UDP connection that's incoming? Let's say, I have a request for the port 1433 on WAN #1, is it possible to split this traffic between both WANs? Like redirect the traffic to my other WAN IP ?
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Hmm, I agree something is not right. You should be able to max. out both connections.
In bound load balancing can be done, to share load between two internal web servers for example, but not to share WANs. For that you would need some sort of external proxy.
Steve
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Ok, I got it fully working now.
I am not sure what was the problem but I did a config reset and started all over. Same problem until I set the MTU manually on the DSL connection.
Works like a charm, downloading at nearly 4MB/s from usenet.
It'll be very useful here since the kids do like to download a lot of stuff and I might even set up a mini itx firewall with load balancing and traffic shaping.
Thanks a lot ;)
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No problem, glad you got up and running.
Don't know how much help I was in the end. ::)Steve
