peplink balance 30 - any reason NOT to get it?

Quote from Trader13:Have you tested a downtime scenario? For example, just unplugging one of your network services and watching it failover to the other...
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Yes, very interested in this as well since I've never owned one.

Could you unplug your WAN0 and let us know how long it takes a machine on the LAN to failover and resolve on WAN1?


Quote from lwlee:One of the selling points was that it had gigabet ethernet ports.
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Not trying to be Debbie-Downer about the gigabit ports but the Peplink website clearly states that the Peplink 20 through 310 can only handle 100mbps throughput.

Since best-practices would assume that you never directly connect a computer or server to your router/firewall why not base your decision on your connection speed and the actual ability of the router/firewall to push data at 10/100/1000 speeds (can the Peplink 20 push data at a sustained gigabit speed across the lan (routed through the router)?


Here is an example of what I mean:

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/lanw...-features-but-slow-downloads?showall=&start=3

If you have a T1 connection at 1.54mbps a cheap Linksys WRT54GS running DD-WRT could be an awesome router solution for $20. You can attach a gigabit (or even 10GbE) switch to this and push data across your LAN at stupid fast speeds. The Linksys WRT54GS tops out around 25mbps throughput (even though it has 10/100 ports) so you would be well over the capacity of your internet circuit.

Routers & firewalls have CPUs in them just like computers. Most of the time routers & firewalls can not sustain anywhere near the throughput of the interface advertisements (they can't push gigabit speeds but have gigabit ports).
 
it does connect; will wait to give full results until i've tested some more / get some feedback from the company which sold it to me, i'm waiting to hear from them regarding some DNS questions i have.

but i'll follow up...
 
ok, it works like a charm.

i bought mine from 3gstore for a little bit more money than some other options, but i had heard very good things about their service and they provide technical support as well. i hoped not to need it, but my hotbrick was a disaster to set up - i wound up having a networking friend of mine come over to set it up because the instructions and technical support weren't very helpful.

so...get it out of the box. there's no manuals, they're all online. 3g has a bunch of help guides for specific setups (including gaming, etc.) but i mainly worked off the pdf which was on peplink's site.

and it was a breeze. i had already tweaked my PCs settings because of hotbrick (the network connections area), so i don't know if i'd really need to set them again if i was installing peplink from scratch - but the installation was painless. there's a setup wizard option for configuring the different WANs, which made most of my hotbrick problems go away.

there were only two issues i had at this point 1) i had a 30 second switch to my backup (DSL) when i clicked the 'disconnect' button on my main server (cable) 2) my DSL couldn't always find a DNS server.

i solved #2 by putting a DNS server in my windows network connections area, but subsequently found out that they allow you to put DNS settings in peplink, which was convenient - and they also have a (shut off by default) option which says "if i can't find a DNS server, use google's default DNS servers".

3g helped with #1 - i had my DSL connection set to be backup. when i tweaked it to be on continuously, if i clicked the disconnect button for cable, it took a couple seconds at most to switch over.

i'm a happy camper. it's only been a week since i've had this, but it seems to be exactly what i wanted.
 
Nice work. When I was setting up, it was my first time dealing with multiple routers. Turns out you need to make sure you disable DNS server on one of the routers. Afterwards, everything worked as expected. One of my routers Netgear, N300, has wireless. I have DSL connected to Netgear connected to the Peplink and the Cable directly connected to the Peplink. Computer connected to the Peplink.

I don't know about other load balancers but Peplink gets high marks for keeping things simple.
 
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