Load balancing and upload
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I'm a bit new to the PFsense forums, and not the most experienced with multi-wan, so excuse me if this question is a bit new. (I wasn't able to find a definitive answer to this anywhere).
I'm trying to setup load balancing, or will be, on my PFsense router in the near future. However, I had a question regarding how the balancing would work.
Right now I have a server that resides behind pfsense. Most incoming connections will likely be on one of the WANs. Now, when I load balance these WAN connections PFsense can obviously accept connections coming inward from either WAN. However, if PFsense gets a request from WAN1 to connect to the server, can it then establish the connection to WAN2 and reply from WAN2 instead of using WAN1?
My concern is that, with the load balancing, if a connection comes in on WAN1 that pfsense will have to reply and establish connection (and upload) from WAN1 – and essentially my WAN2 upload will go unused since all connections will be likely incoming from WAN1. (The reason for this is because I have dynamic DNS setup for WAN1 at the moment since my IP changes, although rarely.) This would essentially make the second WAN near useless, since my motivation for getting a second line would be to increase the upload speed.
My gut feeling says that I'm correct in thinking that incoming connections on WAN1 will be replied to on WAN1, and the connection could not be moved over to WAN2 through the load balancer ... However, I just don't have the experience and knowledge of Multi-WAN + TCP/IP routing to know this for sure.
Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks a bunch :)
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You are correct, the connection cannot be moved over to the other WAN in that way.
If it comes in WAN1, it will go back out WAN1.
Unless your server is capable of telling the client to redirect itself over to the IP of WAN2 and reconnect, but that doesn't really involve changing anything on pfSense.