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Load sharing or Failover for a router? Or should I have two LANs?

I have a router that I think will do load sharing between two internet connections. It's an ASUS RT-AC66U. The internet connections are:

1: Local WISP: Radio on roof feeds through a Cat 5 ethernet cable to the router's WAN connection. Speeds are slow, 3Mbps max. The WISP is pretty reliable, if slow.
  1. Hughesnet Gen 5: Dish on roof feeds through another cat 5 cable to port 1 on the ASUS.Speed are usually good, up to 25 Mbps The satellite service is less reliable, heavy rain (I'm in Houston area) causes loss of signal.

The ASUS software recognizes that there is a connection to a WAN on each port.

The software gives me the option of setting up as either failover or load sharing. I'd prefer Load Sharing, because one or the other sometimes gets very slow.

There's another complication.... the Hughesnet service is through their router. The system "works" with a cat 5 from one of the Hughesnet router LAN ports to the ASUS LAN port 1.... but both routers are DHCP servers. So far I've seen no problems with this.... but I haven't run both connected this way for very long.

AM I likely to have problems due to both apparently assigning DHCP addresses? I could turn off DHCP serving on the ASUS, but then I think the WISP wouldn't be able to serve any computers. I don't see any way to turn off DHCP on the Hughesnet router.

Is one or the other mode (Failover or Load sharing) likely to be more trouble free? Any advantage to either one?

My local network consists of three computers, a connection to a Dish network recorder, a connection to a Roku, and occasional access by a couple of tablets and cell phones. Ideally, I'd like to keep everything on one LAN, but if this setup with the one router is likely to have problems, is it possible to have two LANs, with some sort of connections so that the computers in one LAN and communicate with those in the other?

Reply to
Charlie Hoffpauir
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Whether you use failover or load share, it will only work well if the router can detect loss of a link and divert traffic.....

The DHCP servers are in 2 different domains.

the Hughes "LAN" is treated as a WAN by the Asus, so it is just working the same way as any other ISP connection with dynamic IP addresses, even though the Hughes router is running that server

On the home LAN you should only have the Asus serving DHCP - but that sounds like the way it is working.

The key is detecting when 1 link stops working and diverting sessions.

Load balancing for a home router has to normally use "per session" balancing, because the 2 ports it sends traffic out will do address translation to the ISP assigned address

- so splitting the session traffic means the far end device sees that as sessions from 2 different devices.

Load balancing in general only works well if either

- the 2 links have comparable performance and the router just assigns sessions randomly to either

- the router measures performance in some way (latency or bandwidth maybe) and allocates sessions in proportion.

even if load balancing then works, you have a gotcha

- any 1 session may go either way, but will be limited to that WAN link, so anything that needs performance better than the slower link is 50% risk of failing depending on allocation

so failover may be better if 1 link is preferable when both are working.

The drawback with failover is you dont use the lower performance link, so there is some risk it will fail in a way you dont notice until you need it.......

The system just gets more complex with multiple devices and has more potential states, although "human driven" changeover may be ok :)

- if you can get it to work with 1 router then I would stick with that. Stephen Hope stephen snipped-for-privacy@xyzworld.com Replace xyz with ntl to reply

Reply to
Stephen

Thanks for your replies, you've explained a lot. I'll probably just use one or the other, manually changing between the two depending on traffic and weather.

Reply to
Charlie Hoffpauir

"How to configure Dual WAN on AsusWRT routers"

"FAQ: [WAN] How to set up Dual WAN"

There are a few things broken in dual WAN using AsusWRT firmware, so I switched to AsusWRT-Merlin. (I need SNMP to work): Asuswrt-Merlin Changelog ========================

380.67 (16-July-2017) - FIXED: UPNP and SNMP issues in Dual WAN mode. - FIXED: NAT Loopback (merlin mode) in Dual WAN mode wasn't supported.

I don't believer that Dual WAN was fixed in the recent 374.43 AsusWRT-Merlin LTS release but I'm not sure: Find the change log and see. (I'm lazy tonite).

I can supply details if you insist but methinks you'll get better answers in the Merlin forum:

Reply to
Jeff Liebermann

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