Question Ubiquiti EdgeRouter dual WAN setup ?

pipedoi

Distinguished
Jun 29, 2015
2
0
18,510
Hello

i have a question for those who use Ubiquiti EdgeRouter products. We need to do a dual WAN auto-failover setup. We have 2 internet suppliers and we want to have one mail connection and only when this is not available to auto route all the traffic to the backup connection and what is very important, when main connection is back online, move again to that. Now the question is if we can achieve this with EdgeRouter 6P. We wanted to buy the EdgeRouter Pro 8 but it seems that it is out of stock everywhere. Also we need to create VPN server on the router that allows Android 12 / iOS 16 to connect. Thank you very much for helping.
 

Ralston18

Titan
Moderator
Quite a project or assignment.

= = = =

Start by reading the specs and the applicable User Guide/Manual(s) for both the EdgeRouter Pro 8 and the EdgeRouter 6P.

Determine if the required functions listed by the Pro 8 are also on the 6P.

Make a checklist of your requirement: functional, procedural, hardware, software, etc..

Provide more information about your network environment. Other network devices, connections, hardware (routers, servers, NAS, and so forth. That can all be done without revealing any personal or business information.

Include some diagrams to show connections and how the full setup is being envisioned. What now exists and what you are proposing to add.

Identify what will work "out of the box", what might be configured to work, and lastly what does not appear to have an immediate solution.

Show your work and then ask questions based on that work, what you have learned , lastly any questions that still must be addressed or answered.

You can post the information here and use imgur (www.imgur.com) for images and diagrams.

The following link may prove helpful:

https://www.hostifi.com/blog/edgerouter-wireguard-remote-access-vpn

Post more about the environment, the work that you have done thus far, and what you are considering as possible solutions, why you chose those solutions, and how you plan to implement them.

Also: What is the budget and timeframe?
 
I have no clue what is going on at ubiquiti. I used to think there lack of supply was related to manufacturing delays due to covid but they have not gotten any better even in the last year.

It is almost as thought they are quietly phasing out their router line and even some of their consumer wireless bridges.

So its been a while since I messed with a ubiquti router but the OS they run is the same on all of them. Some feature of course don't work if for example it does not have wifi radios. I would think the 6p runs that same software as the pro 8. I don't remember seeing the dual wan ability. The VPN was somewhat limited by the CPU power of the box.

You might consider microtik they make similar product lines and tend to be easier to get even though they are based in latvia. They also run a single router image, be careful they have switches and routers that look physically the same.

In general I would recommend you use a small dual nic pc running a linux based firewall/router to do this. The vpn will be much faster because it has a real cpu and these cpu also include encryption acceleration instructions. The dual wan is a very messy thing to make work.
What does "down" mean. Obviously if the modem powers off then it easy to see a ethernet port went down and switch but that seldom happens. Most times the modem can talk to the router/pc but it has no connection to the internet. You then get into messy stuff like ping IP addresses to detect outage.
But at what point do you consider it down. 1 ping lost, 10% 20% ? Sometime you will lose only some sites but not others. In a lot of cases it is going to be easier to switch this manually. You are going to take a major outage when you switch anyway. Since the public IP addresses changes you are going to get all kinds of session issues. You will have to reopen sessions with web sites and relog in. Some of the real pain in the butt sites will hammer you with the captcha garbage.

Big companies use routing protocols and public IP addresses that can be moved between ISP. You can to a point build your own by using a hosting center server and building 2 vpn tunnels to your server and then run routing protocols to have the data switch back and forth.