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    Pfsense as load balancer with huwei 4g modems as wan

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Problems Installing or Upgrading pfSense Software
    15 Posts 4 Posters 2.7k Views
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    • K
      kejianshi
      last edited by

      OK - Without knowing about the hardware problems you may face, I can speak about the ISP issues you might face.

      If all 4 modems are the same and have the same service provider and the same gateway addresses, you are screwed for sure I'd think.

      It will never work as you would like.  At least thats my understanding.

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      • stephenw10S
        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
        last edited by

        The HUAWEI E5172As-22, if that's what you have, is a desktop router so it should be able to load balance by using private subnets on the WANs.
        http://support.huawei.com/ecommunity/bbs/10195775.html

        Give us more details of your pfSense setup. WAN configurations, firewall rules etc.

        Steve

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        • K
          kejianshi
          last edited by

          Double NAT on 4 NICs - Yuck….
          But it will work.

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          • F
            firewalluser
            last edited by

            @kejianshi:

            OK - Without knowing about the hardware problems you may face, I can speak about the ISP issues you might face.

            If all 4 modems are the same and have the same service provider and the same gateway addresses, you are screwed for sure I'd think.

            It will never work as you would like.  At least thats my understanding.

            Depending on the hw, you can make mobile phone network devices connect to neighbouring cells which will give a weaker signal, but might give you a different gateway. I've forced devices to fix to a particular cell of my choosing which overrides the phone companies own traffic/cell management software but have not checked to see if the gateways were different.

            It would be better imo to have the 4g modems running on different mobile networks which will help redundancy if one mobile company has a problem with their network, but different countries have different mobile network setups, namely in some countries, mobile companies can share independent antenna's whilst in other countries some mobile companies only use their own antenna's.

            Capitalism, currently The World's best Entertainment Control System and YOU cant buy it! But you can buy this, or some of this or some of these

            Asch Conformity, mainly the blind leading the blind.

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            • I
              Iahmad
              last edited by

              @firewalluser:

              @kejianshi:

              OK - Without knowing about the hardware problems you may face, I can speak about the ISP issues you might face.

              If all 4 modems are the same and have the same service provider and the same gateway addresses, you are screwed for sure I'd think.

              It will never work as you would like.  At least thats my understanding.

              Depending on the hw, you can make mobile phone network devices connect to neighbouring cells which will give a weaker signal, but might give you a different gateway. I've forced devices to fix to a particular cell of my choosing which overrides the phone companies own traffic/cell management software but have not checked to see if the gateways were different.

              It would be better imo to have the 4g modems running on different mobile networks which will help redundancy if one mobile company has a problem with their network, but different countries have different mobile network setups, namely in some countries, mobile companies can share independent antenna's whilst in other countries some mobile companies only use their own antenna's.

              but from pfsense box to to router i am using differen subnets. and dns server. for pfsense box the gateway is different for each router. although pfsense is sending traffice to all router but the result is not that what was i expecting.

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              • F
                firewalluser
                last edited by

                Have you tried the same setup in 2.1 and do you get the same results?

                Can you show us what your config is?

                Dont know if you know about this.
                https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN

                Capitalism, currently The World's best Entertainment Control System and YOU cant buy it! But you can buy this, or some of this or some of these

                Asch Conformity, mainly the blind leading the blind.

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                • I
                  Iahmad
                  last edited by

                  @firewalluser:

                  Have you tried the same setup in 2.1 and do you get the same results?

                  Can you show us what your config is?

                  Dont know if you know about this.
                  https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WAN

                  i already read these instruction and i said that load balancing is working but result is not up to mark.

                  please tell me how to copy config file.

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                  • stephenw10S
                    stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                    last edited by

                    How are you testing?
                    Since you have 4 WANs your test meathod will have to use at least 4 connections to take advantage of it. I believe the speedtest.net client uses 4 streams if it can.

                    Steve

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                    • I
                      Iahmad
                      last edited by

                      @stephenw10:

                      How are you testing?
                      Since you have 4 WANs your test meathod will have to use at least 4 connections to take advantage of it. I believe the speedtest.net client uses 4 streams if it can.

                      Steve

                      speed test only shows one stream.

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                      • stephenw10S
                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                        last edited by

                        So you could see traffic on all 4 WANs?

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                        • I
                          Iahmad
                          last edited by

                          but when i go to status trafic graph there i can see traffice on all wans.

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                          • stephenw10S
                            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                            last edited by

                            If you can see traffic going, approximately equally, on all 4 WANs then the load balancing is working correctly. It may be that you are hitting some other limit further upstream. The modems you're using appear capable of 150Mbps if the correct data network is available. Do you know what data network type your ISP is providing?
                            I don't have much experience with mobile broadband but when I have used it I found I was able to get close to the advertised bandwidth only at times of day when nobody else was using it. You might be better trying to use either different cells for each modem (directional antennas?) or different networks.

                            Steve

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