Load Balancing Two Connections with pfsense

[gameboy1998]

Hi,

I will soon have two connections coming into my home - a DSL and a Fiber. After the data cap the fiber will have the same speed as dsl and at the point I would like to load balance them.

I'm planning on loading my old laptop (IBM R50) with pfsense and load balancing the two connections, but the problem is that the laptop has only a single LAN port, so will a USB to LAN adapter like http://www.amazon.in/USB-TO-LAN-ADAPTER-ENTER/dp/B00DVHQBBG work?

If it matters:

Router/Modem: 1) Company provided Modem+Wifi Box, 2) Asus RTN13U running DD-WRT

Let me know if you need my PC specs as well.

 

[getochkn]

A USB lan connection is going to be too slow and dodgy for this kind of this. I would look at a dual WAN router.

 

[gameboy1998]

I don't really have budget for a dual WAN router. Is there no way this could work?

 

[gameboy1998]

I don't really have budget for a dual WAN router. Is there no way this could work?

 

[bill001g]

Your largest issue is going to be to get wifi to work since your wireless signals will go directly to one of the routers going to the ISP.

I have not looked in detail at a RTN13U but if you are running dd-wrt on it you should have the ability to run this a dual wan router.

Still even if you use pfsense it will take a lot of work to use both connections. It is pretty easy to do primary and backup but because you have 2 ip address you have lots of issues if the ip address would all the sudden change while you were logged into your bank account. You will never be really able to combine the 2 to increase the download speed of single session at best you could have some machine in your house use 1 and other use the other one. If you work at it real hard you can have some applications use one and other applications use the other.

 

[gameboy1998]

Your largest issue is going to be to get wifi to work since your wireless signals will go directly to one of the routers going to the ISP.

I don't really understand this statement. If I want I can disable radio on my DSL connection as use my modem+wifi solely as a modem.

If you come across any tutorial to do let me know, I haven't had any luck googling.

I don't want to use pfsense. I only want to combine these two connections, I just thought that pfsense was the best way to do that. I'm perfectly comfortable with using any other means to do the same.

 

[bill001g]

I was more thinking if you were to use pfsense PC the wireless would cause a issue. Both routers would have wireless and if you connected the pfsense device in front of them the wireless signal would go directly to router skipping the pfsense box.

What you would do is plug your DSL connection modem/router into one of the "lan" ports on the asus. Since dd-wrt you can make any lan port a wan port it becomes a dual wan router. The DSL connection would be best setup as bridged mode but to start I would run it as a router, it is complex enough the first time you setup dual wan.

This is not a trivial thing to do, it is the price you pay for "free" stuff like dd-wrt. The dd-wrt has a number of documents on how to setup dual wan. I do not think it is setup with a GUI, maybe they have added it. Most time this is done with line mode commands. The vast majority of the "load balancing" stuff is done with a command called IPTABLES. It will takes hours of reading the documents to understand IPTABLES if you have never seen it before.

 

[techguy911]

dispatch-proxy: https://github.com/Morhaus/dispatch-proxy

A SOCKS5/HTTP proxy that balances traffic between multiple internet connections.
Works on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux.

I think this is what your looking for does wired and wireless.

 

[nimbah_52]

If you want to use your laptop you'll need 3 LAN ports. Two for the internet connections and one to go to a switch. Disable wireless on your routers and put them in modem mode or passthrough mode. pfSense will pick up your WAN IP addresses via DHCP or if you have static details enter them.

The 3rd LAN port will go off into a switch and then you can attach a basic wireless router to this. No problem with load balancing the two lines, just follow a tutorial online. I'm pretty sure pfSense is smart enough not to pull a client off one line and onto another so don't worry about any issues accessing websites etc.