Peplink Dual-Wan Router
- Thread starter Trader13
- Start date
You guys know that https and VPN are very hard, if not impossible to load balance right?
Anyone spending that kind of money on a router should be running a box out of an office and remoting in. This would solve a lot of your issues.
The sizing guides provided by pfSense are a bit light IMO. I run an overkill box for my needs with a few packages and rarely see over 5% cpu but I have a dual Xeon 3.2GHz machine with 8 threads. On 2GB system ram I often see over 25% memory usage.
I would reccomend no less than 1.8GHz dual core and at least 2GB of ram. Also 2.0RC3 is now considered stable.
Anyone spending that kind of money on a router should be running a box out of an office and remoting in. This would solve a lot of your issues.
The sizing guides provided by pfSense are a bit light IMO. I run an overkill box for my needs with a few packages and rarely see over 5% cpu but I have a dual Xeon 3.2GHz machine with 8 threads. On 2GB system ram I often see over 25% memory usage.
I would reccomend no less than 1.8GHz dual core and at least 2GB of ram. Also 2.0RC3 is now considered stable.
Did a bit of research/ebay browsing - you can get a decent tripple interface (dual-wan + LAN) and WiFi for $200 that will handle 1000mbps throughput for a 25-75 person office including moderate VPN usage.
Also, to follow up on load balancing - you really want to look into how you have your load balancing setup because as I mentioned earlier, HTTPS and other secure connections are very tricky as is things like VoIP. It may take your ISPs and whatever is on the other end of the secure connection longer to negotiate the connection than it would have to simply seperate traffic (such as secure on one line and non-secure on the other).
I would suggest as an alternative, to optimize your setup for quick failover handoff and think of your two WANs as an "internet" (jerkoff/porn/fun/youtube/email/whatever) WAN and a "trading" WAN. By keeping the traffic seperate you can do better than load balance and you don't run the risk of slowing yourself down.
Also, to follow up on load balancing - you really want to look into how you have your load balancing setup because as I mentioned earlier, HTTPS and other secure connections are very tricky as is things like VoIP. It may take your ISPs and whatever is on the other end of the secure connection longer to negotiate the connection than it would have to simply seperate traffic (such as secure on one line and non-secure on the other).
I would suggest as an alternative, to optimize your setup for quick failover handoff and think of your two WANs as an "internet" (jerkoff/porn/fun/youtube/email/whatever) WAN and a "trading" WAN. By keeping the traffic seperate you can do better than load balance and you don't run the risk of slowing yourself down.
Thanks for link ... looks like a nice rig. I checked the website for mfg, Syswan Technologies, and they have a large network of retail distributors in the US. By comparison, Peplink doesn't have much retail presence in the US, but they have an online store. Not sure how this US presence translates to service and support.
from the research i've done (one of the benefits of being single - you can spend time trading AND researching dual wan routers!), the peplink is for all intents and purposes the highest quality router on the retail side (i know there are some CSCO one that are more expensive but that's more on the enterprise side) HOWEVER the syswan is comparable in terms of reliability/features. if we were trading these two i'd short peplink/long syswan.
re the load balancing debate, IMHO, traders want a dual wan router b/c of the automatic failover feature, not the load balancing. most high speed internet connections nowdays are fast enough we don't need to use the combined pipes (cable+dsl).
Just install the cards and then install pfSense (discussed previously).
You could also plug up a generic wireless router/switch to the PC-router instead of buying+installing the Cisco wireless card. Just disable the routing in the wireless router, configuring it to act as a switch and wireless access point only. You wouldn't use the WAN port on the wireless router, only the ethernet switch ports.
Tell me what you want and I'll build it for you, configure it and sell it to you...
Its litterally as easy as building a normal computer. Get an old computer (P4 old is fine) buy some decent NICs on eBay, assemble, burn an install CD for pfsense (free open-source software), boot from CD and install.
Configuring it can take a bit of getting used to as it is a firewall/router combo - and by default there are no rules therefore you need to create everything from NAT to enabling DHCP, etc.
Its not like a normal "off the shelf" router where you can just plug it in and it works - but its much much better and more robust than just about anything you can buy off the shelf.
the scalability is litterally unlimited, you can run it virtual and you can upgrade it just as you could a computer.
You can buy a Linksys WRT54G2 router on ebay for like $10 shipped (probably less than $10). That can be flashed with dd-wrt so its an ideal platform for an alternative to an internal WiFi access point. Honestly that Cisco for $20 is awesome and its PCI. You aren't going to find many decent dual-port NICs that are PCI (if any).
This got me thinking and googling....
Here's an OpenWRT MultiWAN HowTo.
After flashing and configuring, this converts a compatible router (like the Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL) to a Dual WAN capable router with failover by assigning one of the ethernet ports as a WAN port. But these can't handle high bandwidth (>30Mbps) like that of a pfSense PC-router setup.
Quote from Mr_You:
This got me thinking and googling....
Here's an OpenWRT MultiWAN HowTo.
After flashing and configuring, this converts a compatible router (like the Linksys-Cisco WRT54GL) to a Dual WAN capable router with failover by assigning one of the ethernet ports as a WAN port. But these can't handle high bandwidth (>30Mbps) like that of a pfSense PC-router setup.
Correct, because the onboard memory (flash) and CPU are small and not built for that. THere are some that allow overclocking however that'll cook the router in short order.
I don't understand why people that spend $1k on a router dont' just build a $300 pfSense box that'll be 10x more reliable and robust.