Intermittent load balancing issue
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I have a Netgate SG-3100 and AT&T fiber with very low latency (4ms) and better upload which has been best for people to remotely access. I have that set as primary and tier 1 for secondary we have spectrum cable set as tier 2 better download not great upload much higher latency around 14ms. More frequently lately Pfsense has been randomly switching to charter when I check the AT&T modem with another device I am able to get connectivity just fine. I can reboot the charter modem and this fixes it but that takes down office phones and fax lines as well every time I do it or recently I found I can route traffic through a specific pc and for some reason that seems to tell Pfsense that AT&T is still working fine and it switches back. Has anyone had this issue? I am using Google to monitor the ip 8.8.4.4 for AT&T and 8.8.8.8 for charter would changing the monitor IPS fix it maybe its just really odd and very inconsistent.
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Check the gateways log. If it's failing over because it sees a problem with the AT&T WAN it will show it there.
Do you have the failover gateway group set as the system default?If you are policy routing only some traffic everything else will be using the system default gateway and that can switch and not switch back if it's still auto.
Steve
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@stephenw10 Thanks for the reply. I did see the error in the logs as being high latency maybe a hiccup that wasn't consistent when I went to test. I have the default gateway set as wanloadbalance to use both connections for ip4 and default for ip6 is set for automatic. I am thinking I need to update to the latest version and reboot the router as we are 24/7 that rarely happens.
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Ah, you can't set the default to load balance like that. The wording was changed to reflect it:
https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/11164
Choosing a load-balancing gateway group there will allow you to set a group of gateways that the auto can select from but it still uses one at a time and does not fail back.
Set the default gateway to a failover group.
The use the the load-balance gateway group in policy routing rules to actually load-blanace the WANs.Steve
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@stephenw10 yeah i should have just shown screen caps and worded it a little better i have been debating setting to just primary and fail over but didn't want to give up the extra bandwidth in the event we go over. so far it just seems to be a little more sticky in not weighting the at&t line the way i want it i guess i could make spectrum tier 3 so i keep the balancing but it highly favors at&t. It may just be coincidence that i passed traffic through a pc and right after other pcs were going through AT&T very curious indeed.
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Yeah, you don't need to give up the load-balancing you just can't do it there.
It has to be via policy routing:
https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/multiwan/policy-route.htmlSteve
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@stephenw10 Forgot to say thank you. I knew I had read that this had been changed but never messed with it because for over a year the tiered thing seemed to work but this makes sense. thanks for taking the time to respond.
