I’ve been using Peplink for years with certain clients for failover routers, but in the last several years got pulled into some other vendors (such as Ubiquiti).
There is one client who is a production house and I was using a Balance One for years, but they just installed some UBNT stuff.
As many professional installers understand, I’ve grown tired of the lack of support from UBNT, as well as their inability to implement things like policy-based routing into the GUI. And after dealing with implementing the config.gateway.json file into the UBNT controller last week, it made think I need to circle back to Peplink.
Two questions I have since I’ve been away for a while (I perused the forum prior to posting and didn’t see a specific response to this question):
In this particular application, I have an ATT Fiber connection and a Spectrum Business connection. I want the Post department to use ATT (based on the Avid machines port in the switch or the SSID to which they’re connected), and the general office folks to use Spectrum. Is that something that’s easy to implement in the GUI?
And secondly my question is about Support. How is the support channel? When I first started using Peplink they weren’t doing a reseller model and I would call and speak to them directly. I think that’s changed now. We have no problem paying a support contract for those times when we may need it for some of our more advanced configurations, and we also have no problem with getting certified or going through some credentials to speak to Tier 3 techs for example.
Just wanted to get a feel for the company/product as I’m not up to speed in the past few years, but I always found the Peplink firmware easy to navigate and the stuff has been bulletproof for me in the environments Ive used it.
In this example I have given this new LAN the IP address 192.168.200.1 / 24 - called Post Dept.
Now that you have the 2 different networks, go to Network → Outbound Policies and create 2 policies (I’ll do the Post Dept one here) - personally, I would recommend using Priority, but you do have the option of enforce - this forces the network in question to use the WAN(s) selected. Priority means that if the preferred WAN is down, then traffic will be re-directed to the next healthy WAN in the priority list.
Note - Outbound Policies work from top to bottom, so when a new outbound session is created the first applicable policy in the list is applied.
There is an option to terminate sessions on connection recovery - with this ticked, (in this example) if WAN 2 failed the health-check and traffic is routed to WAN 1, once WAN 2 becomes healthy again sessions would be terminated on WAN 1 and connected on WAN 2.
There is also an option under Source for Clients Associated with a specific SSID - so you can also use this to priorities Post Dept to use the appropriate WAN connection.
Peplink Support is great, there is a really good network of Certified Peplink Resellers > Here < they are supported by the Peplink team if / when needed.
Thanks @SteveTaylor for the detailed response. Very helpful!
Are you finding that you’re able to use Peplink as your “all-in-one” solution (APs, cloud management, switching, routing, etc)?
Is there anything you feel is currently lacking (in GUI and/or product line)? The one thing I love about UBNT is their metrics in the GUI as well as the product line, I just hate that their company and/or Robert Pera is tone deaf to enterprise installers.
@epmadsen - I find Peplink equipment very easy to configure and manage. InControl (Cloud Management) is excellent as a single pane of glass view of all your devices, but it does sooooooo much more - you can manage all of your Peplink devices using InControl - Routers, AP’s and switches.
Without going into too much detail here, InControl is based on Groups and then devices are added to these groups. Adding tags to the devices makes things really exciting - each group can have multiple different settings applied - which in turn are then only pushed to the devices with the appropriate tag. For instance, if you had 10 AP’s but only 3 of them were around the Post Department, you can just push the Post Dept SSID to those 3 Access Points. Later on if the Post Department expands simply add the appropriate tag to one of the other Access Points and the SSID is automatically pushed.
The reporting side of InControl is fantastic - historical (14 days) of WAN quality detail, particularly useful for troubleshooting cellular issues - you can look back over the last few days to see if the signal quality / strength has changed. Bandwidth usage can be monitored using InControl as well, with notifications available should the devices start using too much (Bandwidth limits are set on the devices GUI).
SIM Pools - this is another excellent tool within InControl - if you have SIMS with data limits, then this is helps to prevent overage charges. As well as receiving notifications, you can also stop the device from routing traffic - it will report to InControl - so you can see it, but devices on the LAN will stop passing data over that SIM.
12 months InControl is included with the purchase of a new device - I would certainly recommend giving this a go with your next purchase.
- you can manage all of your Peplink devices using InControl - Routers, AP’s and switches.