With a new balance 20x, I set up a SFC tunnel with WAN smoothing of 2 links (1 fiber + 1 LTE), and both links are on priority 1 in that SFC tunnel setting.
On the dashboard, however, only fiber is on priority 1 and LTE connection is priority 2.
Then I added my Macbook on that SFC tunnel. When I do “ping” on Macbook, and unplug the fiber connection, the ping would break up for 5 seconds.
However, when I changed two connections to be all at priority 1 on “dashboard”, the ping would NOT break up.
So, it seems to me that even with a different priority settings in the SFC tunnel, the dashboard’s priority settings (default priority settings) would still matter? This could be troublesome, since if I only want that Macbook using both connections with WAN smoothing and the rest of the devices use fiber ONLY (and LTE as a backup connection), how can I do that (without losing the proper WAN smoothing feature)?
You are seeing the expected behavior and I’d not consider it to be troublesome when configured correctly. Actually, it works extremely well. The Outbound Policy feature is your friend. All you have to do is set a policy to direct the Macbook’s traffic to SFC and change the defaults to Priority with fiber as first and cellular as second. (You can define the Macbook either my MAC or IP address. I’d only use the latter if an address reservation has been set or a static address is in use.)
Remember, the rules are interpreted from top down, as discussed in the firmware manual and here on the Forum. As soon as the conditions of one rule are met all further rules are disregarded.
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The outbound policy is now in “advanced” tab. The SFC tunnel I mentioned has a new UI which allows users to directly add devices into that tunnel. With this new UI, it seems that I don’t need to create any outbound policy?
It seems that the new UI was trying to simplify the setup. Instead of creating an outbound policy, it assigns a device directly to the SFC tunnel, but somehow the priorities in that SFC tunnel wasn’t able to completely override the default priority settings.
Please see my attached image.
Yes, one can do that. Here we find it easiest to simply use Outbound Policy.
Yes, but I mean if some prosumers use the simplified way, they would find it not work, just like I did. It sounds like a bug to me?
@Rick-DC Actually, I just tried to use Outbound Policy, and it didn’t solve the problem. The reason is the “dashboard” priority overrides any priority in the speedfusion setting. I saw the help text: “only healthy links with the highest priority will be used for routing traffic”.
This means any link with priority 2 on Dashboard will be just in “standby” mode, even if the SFC tunnel says it is on priority 1.
This might be working as designed, but for a first-time user, it is pretty confusing. At the minimum, there should be tutorials (video and text) about various common scenarios to help users to set up.
Yes, if you have placed a WAN in standby it is not “healthy” (“up” and immediately available). SpeedFusion cannot resurrect a WAN from Standby mode. The Peplink GUI is rather clear about that, as is the firmware documentation. I’ll leave it to others to determine if this is a conflict or confusing. Personally? I think Peplink has made it clear and very easy to implement – just one person’s view.) If you believe otherwise you may always submit a feature request.
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