4 ADSL Connections. 2 Gateways. How to Load Balance?
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Hi All,
I have 4 ADSL lines installed. Two of these lines have static ip addresses and the gateway is the same. Two other lines have dynamic ips but their gateways is also the same but different from the ones which have the static ips.
I am currently using the TP-Link TL-R470T+ http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/cat-4910_TL-R470T%2B.html and this device is able to load balance all the four connections using PPPoE and I am having no issues here. However, I want to retire this device and replace it with a pfSense build which I could test well using only 1 of the 4 ADSL lines. The reason I want to replace the tp-link load balancer with the pfsense is that I want to control and audit the access which this device does not let me do.
I followed a few guides to configure load balancing but none of the seem to be working. I can establish the session with the DSLAM but when I test for the utlisation of the out bound lines, only one of them seems to be taking all the traffic. I am attaching a quick layout which I was able to make.
Can someone point me to a guide/tutorial which can help me achieve this?
For reference, I am using the latest build of pfSense. My ports are all working. Thanks in advance.
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Hi,
There are several posts about this topic in this forum but you can use this very neat tutorial I fond working:
http://www.tecmint.com/how-to-setup-failover-and-load-balancing-in-pfsense/Also more detailed information can be found here:
https://doc.pfsense.org/index.php/Multi-WANThe only thing that I didn't manage to work around yet is to using multi-link with HAVP/Squid :-\ there are some old documents available but the pictures are missing in them…
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I tried the techmint tutorial. It did not work for me. That is why I posted here. I will give it a shot again this time with the modems in PPPoE modes rather than having pfSense establish the outbound connection.
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I tried the techmint tutorial. It did not work for me. That is why I posted here.
If you don't even tell "what doesn't work", then helping is quite difficult ;)
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Assuming you have the gateway groups setup right, check firewall rules on Lan side. Remember the firewall rules are followed from top down. Once it's matched pfsense won't look at the rest rules. Make sure your load balance gateway group comes 1st in priority top down.
Make sure you are not using a https based website or link to check your load balance. Https traffic will not be load balanced. It will always take the 1st (default) gateway. Maybe you could try speedtest.net
Just confirming.. But are all gateways in your load balance group set at tier1?if not they should be.
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If you don't even tell "what doesn't work", then helping is quite difficult ;)
Sorry for not being clear. When I configure the outbound connections using PPPoE, pfSense does establish a connection on each of the 4 outbound lines. The IP addresses are assigned to the interfaces correctly. However, when trying to test out the load balancing, it is noted that with multiple torrents having enough seeds, all traffic is being directed to a maximum of two outbound lines. Same with a multi-threaded http download using Internet Download Manager.
What seems to get it to work is to use only two of the interfaces, one from 59.x.x.x gateway and the other from 117.x.x.x gateway in PPPoE mode. So now, I have two PPPoE interfaces and two of the other modems are configured in PPPoE mode directly with the pfSense interface on DMZ mode for both of them. Using this method, I am indeed able to load balance all the four outbound lines and utilise the entire available bandwidth on each of them.
I may be wrong here but it appears to me that pfSense still cannot load balance if the WAN Gateway IPs are the same? Please correct me if I am wrong so that I can devote some more time to get it to work in the correct way and get rid of two tiered NAT that I am currently having to use on two of the interfaces.
Thanks for looking and responding.