Peplink Balance 20 or 30

I have a small home network using a static IP DSL without any blocked ports. I’m thinking of adding cable ISP and I believe that they block port 25 and only offer dynamic IP for residential use. It seems like the Balance 20 or 30 would be a good choice. I have a couple of questions.

(1) Can I route all outgoing port 25 traffic to the DSL ISP?

(2) Would outgoing traffic from my web server get split between the cable and DSL regardless of where (DSL or Cable) the request originated from?

(3) Would it be possible to track the cable IP address if I used a dynamic DNS service?

(4) Would I simply hook up my current wireless router (Cisco-Linksys E4200) behind the Balance 20 or 30 router so that basically the Balance 20 or 30 just splits the traffic between the two WANs?

Thanks in advance,
Craig

(1) Can I route all outgoing port 25 traffic to the DSL ISP?
Answer: You can create Outbound Policy to control all outgoing port 25 traffic to the DSL ISP.

(2) Would outgoing traffic from my web server get split between the cable and DSL regardless of where (DSL or Cable) the request originated from?
Answer: I assume you are doing port forwarding for your web server. Below document will explain in details how you can access the web server from different links.
http://www.peplink.com/index.php?view=faq&id=165&path=29

(3) Would it be possible to track the cable IP address if I used a dynamic DNS service?
Answer: Balance 20 and 30 do support DDNS with few providers. In fact the WAN port can be configured to perform PPPoE.

(4) Would I simply hook up my current wireless router (Cisco-Linksys E4200) behind the Balance 20 or 30 router so that basically the Balance 20 or 30 just splits the traffic between the two WANs?
Answer: Yes. As simple as that. You can further customise the traffic flow with some Outbound Policies.

Stanley,

Thanks for your answers. It sounds like the Peplink Balance 20 or 30 will be a great solution. I have a couple more questions.

(1) From what I have read, the only difference between the 20 and 30 is 2 or 3 wan ports, is that correct?

(2) The port forwarding seems straight forward. Is there an option to change the external port into a different internal port. The Cisco-Linksys E4200 has that feature and I have found that it’s quite handy.

(3) Charter is my cable company, so I googled for PPPoE and got a mixed result regarding their support for PPPoE, hopefully I will be able to set it up.

(4) The first thing I would try is a simple Round Robin DNS setup because it’s simple to implement and it will split the incoming traffic between the two ISPs. This is the part that confuses me a little, when the web server responds to a standard http request (not a https) from WAN1 will it reply only to WAN1 or will the outbound traffic get split to WAN1 or WAN2 depending on the algorithms used by the Balance 20/30?

I am looking forward to getting this hooked up first because of the redundancy aspects and it seems like it will also boost the speed performance possibly more than the sum of the connection speeds.

Thanks for you answer,
Craig

(1) From what I have read, the only difference between the 20 and 30 is 2 or 3 wan ports, is that correct?
Answer: Yes.

(2) The port forwarding seems straight forward. Is there an option to change the external port into a different internal port. The Cisco-Linksys E4200 has that feature and I have found that it’s quite handy.
Answer: Yes, there is such option in port forwarding.

(3) Charter is my cable company, so I googled for PPPoE and got a mixed result regarding their support for PPPoE, hopefully I will be able to set it up.
Answer: It should work on most of the PPPoE configuration.

(4) The first thing I would try is a simple Round Robin DNS setup because it’s simple to implement and it will split the incoming traffic between the two ISPs. This is the part that confuses me a little, when the web server responds to a standard http request (not a https) from WAN1 will it reply only to WAN1 or will the outbound traffic get split to WAN1 or WAN2 depending on the algorithms used by the Balance 20/30?
Answer: You can find more details about Inbound Load Balancing in below URL. FYI, only Peplink Balance 210, 310, 380, 580, 710, and 1350 have a built-in DNS server that enables this functionality.

Stanley,

I read the link about load balancing and the built in DDNS and it seems like a very good solution but it’s above my price point.

There is one issue that I am still unsure about. If a user requests a page from WAN1 and then there is a persistent (keep alive) connection with the browser, I would guess that all of those requests would be returned using the WAN1 connection. Browsers usually open several connections at the same time and because of the DNS they would also be requested from the same WAN1 IP address. Will the router send the replies back only through the WAN1 IP or would it start sending some of them back to the users browser using the WAN2 IP?

Thanks for your answers,
Craig

Hi Craig,

You are correct, if a request comes in via your WAN1 IP then the reply will always go back out that same connection.

Thanks,
Tim

Tim,

Thanks for the answer. Just out of curiosity, from the little bit I know about TCP/IP, it seems that it might be possible to receive packets on the WAN 1 IP and send them out on the WAN 2 IP since the Peplink Balance would know all of the Initial Sequence Number information. Do you think that would be possible or would it just seem like a hacked connection?

Craig

Hi Craig,

No, that would not work because the reply would be coming from a different IP address.

Thanks -Tim