2 ISPs/2 Routers/1 Switch

[unplugme71]

I have CCI Fiber and Google Fiber installed at the house. I'd like to use the Ubiquiti Unifi Secure Gateway which only supports a single WAN. So I plan to buy two of these. I also plan to buy their 48 port switch.

Is it possible to have two ISPs, each have their own gateway, and tied into the same switch? I'm not sure how smart the switches are. But I want to program it so that it is round robin or failover to the ISP.

 

[getochkn]

Normally any sort of fail over or loasd balancing is done by a router. Even smart switches are kind of dumb when it co es to these things.

The way I see it to work would be using a3rd router that does fail over and load balancing and plugging each of the other routers you want into it. That or build a PC too run pfsense with 3 nic cards in it. One for each routerstream and 1 to go out to the switch.

 

[bill001g]

It will be hard to do any form of automation but you could say put the first router in as 192.168.1.1 and let it run the DHCP etc. You would then put the second router in as 192.168.1.2.

At this point you could either change the gateway on a pc to use the other connection or you can use the route command to send some websites over one and others over the other.

There really is no good way to use both and you can not combine them for example to down a single netflix move faster. You could download 2 different netflix movies one on each connection

 

[unplugme71]

It will be hard to do any form of automation but you could say put the first router in as 192.168.1.1 and let it run the DHCP etc. You would then put the second router in as 192.168.1.2.

At this point you could either change the gateway on a pc to use the other connection or you can use the route command to send some websites over one and others over the other.

There really is no good way to use both and you can not combine them for example to down a single netflix move faster. You could download 2 different netflix movies one on each connection

I'm aware you can't combine speeds. My purpose was to use ISP 1 as my primary and ISP 2 as my secondary. So that if ISP 1 was down, or ISP 1 was being heavily utilized, all other routes would go to ISP 2.

 

[bill001g]

It will be hard to do any form of automation but you could say put the first router in as 192.168.1.1 and let it run the DHCP etc. You would then put the second router in as 192.168.1.2.

At this point you could either change the gateway on a pc to use the other connection or you can use the route command to send some websites over one and others over the other.

There really is no good way to use both and you can not combine them for example to down a single netflix move faster. You could download 2 different netflix movies one on each connection

I'm aware you can't combine speeds. My purpose was to use ISP 1 as my primary and ISP 2 as my secondary. So that if ISP 1 was down, or ISP 1 was being heavily utilized, all other routes would go to ISP 2.

That is the key issue. How does the router know what "down" is. The ethernet port will never go down. The solution to this is a routing protocol that is constantly checking availability but no ISP will offer this to a home user. It will have to be some hack thing that issues ping and then based on the results makes a choice. You also have to have a place to run this special software. There are some third party routers or firewalls but it is all pretty much a non standard solution....it would be nice if the ISP offered even a simple routing protocol.

 

[unplugme71]

I know netgear has some of their UTM devices that constantly send a ping. If it gets no response after a few tries it fails over to the other WAN port on the device. Why can't something like this be setup?

 

[bill001g]

That will work if it has that function but that only looks at ping times it can not detect utilization. This would be a dual wan router rather than a switch.

 

[Kewlx25]

PFSense supports loadbalancing+failover

 

[unplugme71]

PFSense supports loadbalancing+failover

pfSense was my first choice on a SuperMicro 1U server. It has 4 NIC, so I could do 2 for WAN and 2 for LAN. However, I'm leaning towards the Ubiquiti Unifi setup and right now they only support a single WAN. Looks like I may end up with the 1U server to accomplish the two ISP for failover.

 

[DerekVGH]

The Sonicwall TZ series of routers can do load balancing and failover.

http://www.sonicwall.com/us/en/products/Failover-Failback.html

It is a pretty powerful platform for such an inexpensive device.