Failover / Loadbalance characteristics

vitosmaldino

Hi all,
I am evaluating pfSense for use as router / firewall with LoadBalance / FailOver functions with multiple WANs. Initially it seemed not to work, doing more in-depth tests MAYBE I understood how it works. I kindly ask you to confirm or not the following:

when a gateway goes down, the IpAddress (or its emx interface?) located on the same subnet as the gateway is marked as "down"
specific entries are created in the routing table for the IP addresses used for gateways monitoring

Point 1) seems to exclude the possibility of having more than one gateway on the same subnet because if one of the 2 goes down, the other also becomes unusable, for example:
WANaddress: 23.11.22.154/28
GW1: 23.11.22.145
GW2: 11.23.22.158

Point 2) seems to oblige a careful selection of the IPs to be used for monitoring because if the gateway to which it is associated goes down, that IPAddress becomes no longer reachable, so for example 8.8.8.8 cannot be used simultaneously as a monitor and as a DNS forwarder

Thanks for your support.
V

vitosmaldino

@vitosmaldino
edit:
GW1: 23.11.22.145
GW2: 23.11.22.158

SteveITS

@vitosmaldino re: point 2, that part is correct. You can use a web site, other DNS (1.1.1.1), basically anything that responds to pings.