IPSec VPN & load balancing with two DSL connections

cre8toruk

Hi All, I have a netgate running PFSense and have successfully setup Ipsec VPN tunnels which is working great.
I have two DSL connections which are configured in two gateway groups and are assigned to different traffic types. I assume in an active passive way.

With all the COVID-19 stuff going on we're looking to get some people working from home and I was wondering if it was possible to set the IPSEC vpn tunnels to work on a load balance of the two DSL connections?

Is there a guide somewhere on how to do that?

Apologies if that's a bit of a ramble happy to clarify :-).

Paul.

jimp

The tl;dr answer is: Not effectively. Not for IPsec.

To load balance across two IPsec tunnels you would need a several things things. Note that this assumes pfSense on both ends.

Tunnels setup using routed IPsec on both tunnels on both ends (VTI, assigned interfaces, etc)
Gateway groups using equal tier values for both routed IPsec tunnel interface gateways
Policy routing rules setup on the LAN(s) directing traffic for the VPN to use the gateway group

One of either:

4a. Return routing to ensure that packet replies go back out the interface they entered -- This is where it breaks down the most, since on FreeBSD, the reply-to feature of pf doesn't work on IPsec interfaces. Without this, traffic will always return over one interface (whichever has a static route back to the remote end)
4b. NAT on the IPsec interfaces so the remote side will send the traffic back the expected path -- NAT+VTI have some issues, but this may work in some cases, but it adds NAT which would break some protocols which otherwise would work inside a VPN

As you can probably tell from that, even if it did work, it also doesn't scale well to multiple remotes, since you'd need another pair of tunnels+interfaces+gateways+rules for every peer, and definitely isn't an option for mobile IPsec.

You can use multiple links for site-to-site redundancy by ditching the policy routing and using a dynamic routing protocol like BGP or OSPF to manage the routes and failover.

Another potential workaround doesn't involve VPNs at all: If both your links are from the same ISP, and the ISP supports MLPPP, you may be able to setup MLPPP bonding so both DSL connections are aggregated into a single virtual link which could potentially use the sum total of both circuits in bandwidth. But that 100% depends on your ISP supporting it.

cre8toruk

@jimp thanks for the tips. I think that's a bit complicated for our needs certainly right now and certainly last minute like it currently is.

Any ideas why I can't create another ipsec tunnel and point it at the other dsl connection ? I mean I can but the authentication options don't allow me to point it at my radius. I only have Mutual PSK and Mutual (something else) as options in the drop down....

I had hoped I could set up another ipsec tunnel tied to the second DSL connection, but it doesn't seem to let me.