I need advice on optimum settings to cascade a Peplink 30 with a Cisco RV042 dual-Wan router.
The Peplink is load balancing 3 pppoe dsl lines on it’s 3 Wan ports and connected to my 10.0.1.x home network with dhcp enabled. It is serving 20 Lan clients.
I added the Cisco dual-Wan router downstream from the Peplink, because I needed extra bandwidth for two of my Lan clients.
The 4th pppoe dsl line connects to the Cisco’s Wan port 1, and Wan port 2 on the Cisco is attached to the Lan of the Peplink. The Cisco is in load balancing mode.
The Cisco 2nd Wan port is set to “obtain an ip automatically” and is assigned a static ip by the Peplink.
The Cisco has dhcp enabled with static client ip’s on a 10.0.0.x network.
The setup works but is unstable, because this is a double NAT setup.
Should I enable one-to-one NAT mappings or Static Route Settings on the Peplink?
Any other tips to avoid potential issues in this setup?
Hi,
When you say its unstable what stability issues are you seeing? Are there specific internet applications / services you want to use on the two CISCO connected LAN clients that aren’t working properly perhaps?
I think if it was me, I’d leave the peplink 30 connected to two of the PPPoE DSL lines, then put the other two lines on the WAN side of the CISCO and connect the LAN side to WAN3 of the Peplink. That way you can use the comprehensive outbound policies on the Peplink to manage any specific applications / services that don’t like double NAT and send them out over the direct connected WAN1 and WAN 2 and only use the links on the CISCO (via WAN 3 on the Peplink) for straight forward internet access.
Also, this way simplifies your general network configuration as the Peplink is acting as the only gateway for all of your Lan clients.
If you do try this configuration, remember to adjust the available bandwidth setting on the WAN 3 link configuration page on the Peplink to reflect the combined bandwidth of the Links connected to the CISCO.
I am having hard crashes of the Cisco 1-2 time per day requiring unplugging the power to recover.
I am also having flaky dyndns access on the 4th DSL line that connects to the Cisco.
I was previously using the Cisco separately without such issues.
I have enabled one-one NAT on the Peplink and selected all 3 Wan ports for inbound mappings associated to the Cisco’s ip. I am not sure if that will eliminate the double NAT issue.
I am thinking whether using opendns servers on both Cisco Wan ports may be an issue, as I am also using opendns for the 3 Wan ports on the Peplink.
If you think any of these points may be causing problems then please let me know. If I cannot achieve stability using the current setup then I will take your suggestion and let the Peplink be the gateway for all Lan clients.
Hmmm.
How are the two networks subnetted? Are they both /24 or is the cisco lan a /8? Don’t think that opendns on all WANs should be an issue - at least can’t see why it might be. One to one NAT on the Peplink certainly simplifies routing and fault finding, but of course there is still double NAT from the CISCO lan clients when they go out over CISCO WAN2.
The fact that the CISCO falls over regularly makes me suspicious that they is some sort of additive error occurring. Something like a packet storm caused by the loop perhaps. If you run wireshark on both the LANs do you see a lot of routing noise? Any packets with a really low TTL that might suggest packets are getting stuck in a loop?
Still think that my suggestion of CISCO on Peplink WAN is the cleanest approach to this deployment. Good luck with your testing.
Never cascade Peplink with other cheap and less professional load balancers like RV-042 , Dlink , TPLink , Prolink , etc. you will get unpredictable results , while we have a customer who cascades 3 Peplink Balance 30 to each other to aggregate 7 Internet links without any issue and he is very satisfied.