20X Backup Failure and Health Check Recommendations

[Robert_Merkle]

I recently had an incident in which my ISP erroneously closed my account. Internet access to my cable modem was cut off, however my Balance 20X did NOT detect the WAN was down thereby causing the device to go offline rather than failover to cellular. At the time, my Health Check Method was set to DNS lookup, so it’s my feeling that the failure occurred because the 20X was able to reach my ISP’s DNS even though internet had been disabled. Interested to hear others’ thoughts on this diagnosis.

I noticed that DNS Lookup is the default and recommended setting, so I’m wondering which other method I should use to prevent such an incident from happening again. I’m using my 20x for live stream production so it’s very important that failures are detected immediately.

Peplink-Balance-20X firmware 8.1.3 build 5060.

[erickufrin]

There is an advanced option withing the ? mark icon on the health check to configure SPECIFIC IP’s to utilize for the health checking… I’d recommend turning that on and using 1.1.1.1 & 8.8.4.4 - cloudFlare+Google provides HA. I’d also turn off the ISP’s DNS and just use those IP’s as well as your DNS.

[C_Metz]

After many years of changing requirements for each of my various connections, my standard setup is this…

50 seconds might seem like forever during a fail-over event, but I seem to get too many events with 30 seconds and no false events at 50 seconds.