Location Aware routing on peplink Balance router series

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

Hi all,

I have just been told by my colleagues that peplink can do the location-aware routing for the link load balancing. Would anyone here explain what it is about and what situation can this technology apply to?

Appreciate if anyone of you can give me some insight about it.

Thanks.

Best.
Bobby

2

Peplink devices can’t do location aware link load balancing. You would normally see this technology used for inbound connection management where a user in the UK would be redirected to a UK based Peplink device and a user in the US would be redirected to a US based Peplink device.

You can achieve a lot of this with externally hosted DNS however. For example I did a multi-continent install for a customer where the remote users had BR1s and travelled globally. They had a DNS entry called speedfusion.companyname.com registered with a geo aware DNS provider, and all the BR1 SpeedFusion VPN connections used that DNS name as the host on the VPN profile.

That way when the BR1 was in the UK, a speedfusion tunnel was created back to a UK hosted Fusionhub, and when in Australia the tunnel was connected to a FusionHub hosted locally there.

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3

Hi Martin,

Thanks very much for the detailed explanation. Let me describe the scenario and see if you have any ideas on these as well?

  1. In our office, we have two network circuits, one goes to Singapore International Internet and one goes to the local Internet in China.
  2. We need to leverage the “location aware routing” function on peplink to differentiate the network traffic, that means,
    a. Redirecting network traffic to local websites in China via the local Internet link.
    b. Redirecting network traffic to global websites like Google or BBC via the International link in Singapore.
  3. We actually are using this function in some offices in China, but we still need the most updated advices from Peplink and see whether this can work in the latest version of Peplink Balancer series.

Thanks very much and appreciate for your reply.

Best,
Bobby

4

Hi Bobby,

So you can do outbound routing based on DNS, which will get you some of the way as you could have outbound policy entries for *.google.com that routes all traffic over the sinagpore link.

The only way I’ve seen this done before is with a list of all the IP blocks for a country and then using that to make routing decisions. For example this list IPdeny IP country CIDR blocks gives the IP blocks for each country (China has 7791 blocks), however Peplink devices do not have an easy way to import these lists to generate rules from them.

If I absolutely had to make something work today, I would likely pick up a Mikrotik router or build a PFsense box and load the China IP block lists on that, then set a default outbound route for all traffic apart from that destined to China to go via the Singapore link, and a separate rule that matches destination IP against the China list to redirect to an alternative gateway that sends over the China WAN link…

Kindest,
Martin

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5

Hi Martin,

I have just double confirmed with the engineer from peplink in China and they said the “location-aware routing” can help on differentiate the traffic. This the screen capture they provided.

This is just for sharing. I have also tried to enable and disable this on our existing device. And it does really do the trick. I am wondering whether this is based on the layer 3 capabilities or the technologies on the other OSI layer to make this work?

Thanks.

Best Regards,
Bobby

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6

Hi Bobby,
Thanks for the update. I haven’t seen that feature yet. What device/firmware are you running?
Its not visible on any of my devices…

Martin

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