Balancing 3 connections?

I have a setup that includes 3 WAN interfaces. Two are cable modems (200 down, 20 up) one is a wifi connection (75 down, 75 up).

I want the wifi WAN connection to only be used for certain things:

  • backup if other links are down
  • upstream ONLY for outbound connections originating from one VLAN
  • spillover from all other VLANs if the cable upstream is saturated

Of note, right now I see that on the wifi WAN connection, my basic parameters are not being obeyed. I set the cable connections to 200/20 in the WAN setup screen and the wifi to 1/20 yet I still see tons of outbound traffic on the wifi WAN. Why? If I tell the box that only 1Mb/s is available for downstream on the wifi WAN, should it not be favoring the two other WANs?

You should be able to drag the WIFI WAN to priority 2, this should list the interface as being in standby. Once WAN 1 and WAN 2 go down from priority 1, the device will failover to priority 2. The second two points can be done using Outbound Policy with the Priority Algorithm.

When establishing a download speed, the information will come in as fast as the WAN will allow, as the Peplink device isn’t able to tell the modem/AP to only send X amount of data at a time. The upload that’s listed can be limited by the Peplink as that’s controlling the data being sent. For better control of WANs, I’d recommend using Outbound Policy.

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I’m not finding a place where things can be dragged. This is a Balance 305 at 7.1.0.

You guys don’t really disclose how the balancing works, but on other devices, input like “I have X Mb/s of download here” would factor in to which uplink is used when a new connection from inside the LAN is made.

For example, in my case I have 200Mb/s, 200Mb/s and 60Mb/s for downstream bandwidth. So my load balancing algorithm would look at that and try to keep a ratio of 3:3:1 when setting up new connections. So if there are 21 outbound connections, 9 on the first 200/20, 9 on the next 200/20 and 3 on the 60/60 (again, the ratio: 3:3:1 = 9:9:3). Let’s say these are all webpage requests - return traffic (bulk of the data in fetching a webpage) is also going to follow that ratio. It won’t be exact, but all in all, more data will return on the two faster connections. Make sense?

Hello sporkman,

I thought you had been using the Max series. On the Balance series you’ll need to click on the Network tab. This should take you to the WAN info. Click on the WAN name and in the first Connection Settings box you can find the Connection Type. By default this is set to Always-on. Change this to Backup Priority. A drop down will appear next to the Backup Priority.

If I’m understanding you correctly, once a session is created the traffic will continue to use that session. So once a request is sent out, the response for that webpage will come back using the same WAN that it was sent out on.

I’m unsure if this may help but we do have a description that was put together by Alex of how our Load Balancing Algorithms work.

I hope this helps!

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Is there a way to keep a WAN interface pingable when it’s set to “Backup Priority”?

I believe that when a WAN is in Standby or in Backup Priority you won’t be able to ping it. But once the interface becomes active you will be able to ping, provided you have “Reply to ICMP PING” allowed and the ISP allows responses to ICMP.

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This makes monitoring a bit hard - we often use 3rd party providers where the only thing we can really verify ourselves is being able to do an end-to-end ping. Since the line in this case is primarily backup, we don’t want to find that it was disconnected, unplugged, down, etc. when it’s actually needed - we want to be proactive. Is there any way to keep in pingable so we can monitor?

Are you able to not set that 3rd WAN to back-up but set the outbound policies so that it will only be used under the desired circumstances? If you can do this it will remain “pingable.”

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Not sure - the only “desired circumstance” for that much slower line to be used would be when the faster line is down. The current setup is kind of a no-brainer, no idea why the line has to go unpingable.

Does the Peplink monitor lines that are setup as backups or is it only doing health checks on active connections? My only goal here is to be notified that the backup line is down, regardless of whether it’s being used or not. It’s not uncommon for a generally unused connection to be unplugged, get its pairs stolen by the phone company or any other number of things. Monitoring is the easy way to cover all sorts of possible reasons a backup line that’s not normally used is actually working.

Also just to be clear, the options on the WAN setup indicate that I don’t want always-on, at least according to the tooltip:

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Are you suggesting that something like setting the priority to “0” for the “backup” would leave the connection pingable but unused? Would a “0” priority line ever be used? This is in the “outbound policy” section.

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The priority option as well does not really indicate that the lower priority connection would not be used as long as the line is up:

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