Bandwidth Allowance, Scheduling, and Bonding hand holding needed

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

Drek:

First, I’d like to express my absolute conviction that Peplink is great. I’ve had no trouble at all with my entry level Balance in a year of use so far, and I was absolutely ecstatic to see they got rid of that retarded ‘pay to have a firmware upgrade’ thing; I’d wondered why installing 6.2 didn’t ask for a key, and then saw the message. I was fixing to be bummed, though, that even in the latest firmware, there’s absolutely no mechanism for limiting bandwidth during certain times (asked for as far back as here: Peplink | Pepwave - Forum). Except, these peplink guys really rule, because it IS implemented in the current beta 6.3. (What a roller coaster of emotions! ;p)

So, now having the capability to do scheduling, I could really use a bit of hand-holding if anyone’s done what I want:

[ul]
[li]Normal Operation (Metered):[/li][LIST]
[li]WiMAX - Unrestricted bandwidth usage[/li][li]SAT - No usage at all[/li][/ul]

[li]Abnormal Operation (WiMAX down, because cheap CPE performs cheaply):[/li][ul]
[li]Use Satellite as fall-back when (not ‘if’, it’s why I just got satellite installed…) wimax is down (10 days, in the last 2 weeks!)[/li][li]Limit Satellite bandwidth to 1mb speed.[/li][/ul]

[li]OS Porn (that’s one word, folks) and Youtube Greed Operation Mode:[/li][ul]
[li] No bandwidth restriction on Satellite, Sat is primary,[/li][li]Wimax-WAN should be bonded and use full capacity of it as well[/li][/ul]
[/LIST]

The scheduling stuff was pretty non-intuitive for me, but I’ve currently got a schedule set up for daily (really could use some short cuts on the schedule screen, like ‘Every Day’ :wink: ) at the proper hour ranges for Satellite, and then under WAN, instead of ‘always-on’, I have it using that schedule. I then have an outbound policy, again using that schedule, with it set to weighted balance, wimax at 5, and sat at 10 for the load distribution weight.

I can’t figure out how to do what I outlined above, though; if actually setting the Sat-WAN to 0 in outbound policy (Believe I saw that in the youtube video) only uses it if the primary is down, then I assume I could change the Sat-WAN to always-on, because it shouldn’t ever get used during metered hours — I assume I’d need to have a rule with it at the 0 priority for all the metered hours, and leave the rule I already have for the unmetered hours? That’s what I’m confused about, as well as how to limit the actual bandwidth some times, but not others.

Thanks for any help with this!

2

Hi,

  1. OS Porn (that’s one word, folks) and Youtube Greed Operation Mode:
  • There is no perfect way to do this (especially Youtube). You need to know the all the related domains for the OS Porn and Youtube. In fact, there are many components are loaded from different sites when you browse www.youtube.com (for example). Below is the details.

1365×728 89.8 KB

You can create Outbound rules below if you know all related domain (again, load balance for Youtube traffic is difficult).

Source: Any
Destination: Domain Name <related domain name>
Protocol: Any
Algorithm: Persistence
Persistence Mode: By Source
Load Distribution: Custom
Load Distribution Weight: Wimax=5, Sat=10

Then, create outbound rule below for Normal Operation and Abnormal Operation:

Source: Any
Destination: Any
Protocol: Any
Algorithm: Priority
Priority Order: 1)Wimax 2)Sat

  • We can’t limit download speed for particular WAN at the moment.

Hope this help.

3

Thank you for the response; I appreciate it. I should have been less specific; I’m not interested in specific domains like youtube; it was an example of what I want to use bandwidth for (downloading whole channels like Google Developer’s vids, downloading OSes/firmware (Slimkat, for example), etc. The latter, I could do with wget from the same system I download (scrape) youtube. I can simply put a rule for that (ip), I know.

The satellite plan I have (Exede, Essential 10) has a maximum of 10gb a month ‘normal’ usage. Except for 5 hours, where I can use the full bandwidth of it, without it metered.

My wimax internet is unmetered. It’s slower, but not horribly so now. (It’s at 5mb/s… considering where I live, and compared to dialup, that’s insanely fast for me.).

My objective is to not use the satellite at all, during the ‘normal’ hours, except for when there’s no access via the wimax, and, then, only use it for ‘real’ traffic. It looks like I can set up email to know when it switches over — I’ve been doing it manually, so far. (Since my original post here, my wimax has gone out twice, for over four hours and two hours, respectively.)

Having the ability to have a fallback is actually why I bought this specific router in the first place, and it’s quite brilliant. I’m sure I’m missing some essentials, since what I’m trying to do would seem like something a lot of people do. I’ve been playing with the settings, and I’m making some progress.

What I’ve had no luck with, is actually having the peplink behave and saturate my connection with both WAN ports for the ‘unmetered’ time.

During ‘normal’ times, I want ALL traffic ALWAYS going through the wimax wan. Unless it’s gone; then I want it going through the sat wan, and only until the wimax wan comes up. (This seems to just be that check box on persistent connections in the outbound rule.) I think if I specify a rule stating all https should go through wimax, with sat at a 0 priority, that should handle fall back — and then a rule after that, that puts all other traffic always (‘enforced’?) through the wimax, would show me that the connection is now down (http would stop working, any frivolous stuff happening, like outbound on 1080, etc). Is this correct?

Should I always use the priority order, vs the weighted, to make sure the second only is used during failure of one WAN port? Or does setting 0 for weighted actually accomplish that?

I had the outbound rule you typed, but not as ‘persistence’, so I’ll try that; I’m not seeing my sat wan get fully saturated (in the unmetered time) AND combined with the wimax wan. I put in the values for the bandwidth, which might be a problem here, since the sat is variable (supposed to be 12mb, but fluctuates).

I really appreciate the help; I think I’ve got it mostly working. It’s flat out thrilling to see the sat-wan actually go offline at the right time, so now I’m working from that towards having it always on, but never used, except when it’s unmetered.

4

Hi,

Can you let me know when is your unmetered time for SAT? I can provide better advice with this info.

Basically, you are looking advice below. Do correct me if I am wrong.

Metered time
Primary link = Wimax
Standby link = SAT

Unmetered time
Primary link = Wimax and SAT (load sharing for both links)

5

Unmetered time is 3am to 8am.

You’re correct; the only addition is that, for metered time, I only want https to work for SAT. (Anything that’s not going over https (like socks proxy on 1080) can die until the wimax comes back up.)

You know, typing here has really helped me; I think what I need at this point is just to enable https from a single IP, during metered time, with the SAT as the fallback; I always run youtube scrapes on a linux machine, and those tend to be non-essential (well, except when I snagging wireshark tutorials to troubleshoot my crappy network performance. :^) )

Currently, I’ve got the SAT set up with a schedule, where the link actually is down all the time, except between 3a-8am. When the wimax goes out for more than 5 minutes, and I’m in the middle of work, I’ve been manually changing it from that schedule, to ‘always on’.

Ideally, I’d like to not worry about leaving it always on as a fall back, safe in the knowledge nothing will use it, except the essential traffic. You’ve already been very helpful; this is low priority, so no need for much effort; the most important question I have is, how do I set the dials (weights?) such that during metered time, I won’t be using the SAT. Does setting to ‘0’ do that? Is the scheduling stuff pretty much set as is, or, this being beta, is there a chance there’ll be bandwidth throttling? Whatever the case, thanks again!

6

Hi,

If you use Weighted Balance algorithm and set Wimax=10, SAT=0 with Terminate Sessions on Link Recovery enabled. Below is the behavior:-

  1. Wimax and SAT up - Wimax will be used.
  2. Wimax down and SAT link up - SAT will be used.
  3. Wimax recovered and SAT link up - Wimax will be used.

The scheduling feature in v6.3.0 beta is our future direction.

I have created a thread on Feature request for the request of bandwidth throttling here - Peplink | Pepwave - Forum.

Thank you.