Choose which is the "primary" internet?

Hi all, is there a way to determine which WAN port is the primary internet on the Balance 20? I ask because I have a script that uses a public IP lookup service for dynamic dns, and sometimes it gives my cable IP address and other times it’s my DSL IP address (usually after a reboot of the modems). For example if I type “what is my ip” into google, it’ll show either my cable or dsl ip address (just randomly). If possible, I’d prefer it to always use the cable if it’s active, and fall back to the DSL if the cable is down.

you want to set up outbound policies to use Priority. As long as the primary wan is available, it will be used. You can use source IP/Network depending on if you want this for just your device or for everything on the LAN.

Another way would be to set the DSL connection to “Backup”
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I am pretty sure that it won’t even initialize the DSL link unless the primary link goes down. don’t quote me on that though. It is possible that it initializes it, but never routes traffic to it. I am not really sure.

In my humble opinion, unless you have data caps; you may as well use both connections. You spent the money on both, and you bought a router that is really good at utilizing both simultaneously. By default, it just does the best it can (why your IP changes “randomly”). I am pretty sure it uses a weighted balance for all traffic except for SSL by default. That means that the first 10 outbound connections go out WAN1, the next 10 out of WAN2, etc.

My strategy is to use the “Grouped Networks” and outbound policies. Basically, I create a group for all of the IOT crap devices (Phillips Hue, Samsung Fridge, garage door thingy, AC controls, etc – crap you don’t care how slow/fast it goes) - and then use a priority rule to put them on my “slow” WAN. I create another group for devices my wife and I actually interface with and put them on a priority rule for the “fast” WAN. This gives me automated failover when one of the links goes down, but it keeps the “fast” link available. Nothing worse than not being able to watch Netflix because of a firmware update for a refrigerator.

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Thanks for the advice. That makes sense. I noticed my cable connection has a lower ping and it’s faster than my DSL so I was thinking in online games I would prefer it to use the cable connection for that for the most part, but it doesn’t seem to make a big difference either way. It’s also close enough that it shouldn’t matter much and I’d prefer to not exclude the DSL from file transfers because it downloads very fast now with both connections active.

If you are playing games, definitely set up some outbound policies for “game time”. I dedicate an entire WAN to a single PC when I am playing games. I just have some policies that I enable/disable during game time.

Another “more bang for the buck” setting that I have used for a couple of years is an outbound policy for TCP port 80 traffic. Since most state-full websites use SSL, that means that many state-less webservers are still using port 80 for large file downloads. Of all the games I play, Origin is the only launcher that downloads updates on 443. Most game downloads use more than one TCP session for the download. Each session is downloading a chunk of the download. You can use a “weighted balance” algorithm with a 1:1 weight port TCP port 80 traffic. I have not seen any application level issues other than the progress meter sometimes gets a bit freaked out when one chunk comes in at a faster rate than another chunk. You can fully saturate both of your links doing it this way, but you can always set up some download rates/reservations to keep some bandwidth available during these large downloads.