Load balancing 5 WAN from the same subnet

hannhimhe

I'm on a 100/10mbit LAN connection. I have access to 5 dynamic IPs and I get ~10mbit up / IP. I want to loadbalance these IPs to increase my upload.

After two days of searching on google, reading guides and FAQs I decided to try pfSense. I went to the basement and looked through the hardware I've been keeping for occasions like these. I wound up with a Pentium4 (3GHz), 2GB of DDR-3200 and 2 additional NIC (there is one on the motherboard).

I read and followed MultiWanVersion1.2 using 2 routers to get static IPs. Everything works fine and I have no problem getting 27mbit upload using two of the five available ips.

Today I went back to the basement, I found 2 NICs and 1 router and on my way back to the computers I thought to myself…this is insane, there is no sense in having 5 routers. There must be a way to do this with dynamic IPs. Back to google, the wiki and forums. In all FAQs, guides and posts on this and other forums there is atleast on static IP involved. I've tried my best to use the information I've found and tried to apply it to my setup with dynamic IPs with absolutely no luck.

Is it at all possible to do this (with pfSense)? I'm not asking for a complete solution but on the other hand I wouldn't complain if one were offered. I'm attaching a screenshot of my interfaces. Note that they share subnet, gateway and dns.

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sai

I reckon that if you have two or more interfaces that share subnet and gateway then you will have problems with the routing table on pfsense or any other machine

GoldServe

How does an off the shelf dual wan router overcome this problem??? Something we can do in the system to trick it?

hannhimhe

I am flying this rig with three WANs recieving dynamic IPs from my ISP and Load Balancing works just fine now. I removed all settings that in any way where related to "failover". Looks like all I needed was a couple of GTs and a few more searches on this forum.

The load balance setup is really easy,
I put the gateway IP as Monitor for all three WAN interfaces. Which are the same for all three.

I have managed to send all HTTP-traffic down the WAN-interface using 'default' as gateway. Not that I understand how it works but it does. I'm not complaining.

Next step is to try and get failover to work. Tomorrow.

quentusrex

Are you load balancing the incoming connections? or just the upload speed? I think I have a similiar need. I need to balance incoming connections over 6 WAN's so that the one server serving the content can fully use the upload speed on each of the 6 WAN's.

hannhimhe

I am not load balancing the incoming connections. I have 100mbit downstream whatever I do. The only aspect of my connection I can manipulate is the upstream. I'm only here for the upload. ;D

EDIT:
I forgot about "my progress".
When I used only dynamic ips the NAT freaked on me and refused to forward port 80 to my webserver. After some more searching on this forum and coming a cross an experienced of pfSense on an IRC-network I learned I need one (1) static IP. I'm attaching the network layout below.

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