Cellular Failover with USB Tether Power Outage Issue
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I have setup an old cell phone with a free data plan to act as a fail over in the case that my isp goes out. I have load balancing setup so the phone is only used if there is high packet loss from the ISP. The phone is connected via usb on a protectli box. If I do a reboot on the system, no issues.
The issues comes when there is a power outage. After the outage the hardware starts back up, the back up phone automatically turns on tethering but PFSense gets stuck at the interface setup and requires me to connect a monitor and keyboard to get past that step. I need to define the WAN and LAN and then it will proceed.
Any tips for forcing PFSense to skip this step or other tips. I'd rather not introduce additional hardware, but have thought about testing with a travel router bridging the connection between Phone and PFSense box.
Thanks. -
There are improvements to the USB NIC handling in pfSense 2.7/22.05 which may help here.
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@marcos-ng Thanks. I'll have to take a look as i'm still on 2.6
I was able to mitigate some by always having an android Phone connected with USB Tethering being the default when plugged in. This required Android 9 or higher and the phone being in developer mode.
Now I'll be in trouble if that phone gets disconnected and the system restarts as it will force the interface setup again because the USB interface is down (seems silly).
I'm hoping that with 2.7 it will allow the system to boot even if the usb interface isn't present, like it does if LAN or WAN are not plugged in. This is how my OpenWRT setup with MWAN worked, if a device was present it followed the rules, if it wasn't it followed the rules.