Questions on a new Balance 30 (soon to be 50)

Product Discussion Peplink Balance
1

After a couple of weeks with the Balance 30, I am waiting on a 50 and have a couple of questions. My current configuration is 3 DSL lines 1.5 down and 255 up each. I am looking at adding an existing LTE Verizon Home Fuzion input (approx 5Mb down and 2 Mb up) as well once the 50 shows up. Adding the second DSL line worked so well that I added a third, and thus the increase in size (the LTE Fuzion (Technicolor TG790) attaches via Ethernet).

Current setup questions.
When I originally set up the 2 lines and then added a third, I found that the lines would saturate (run up to 1.5Mb downloads per line and hold there) when heavy usage was happening. At that point, additional activity seemed sluggish at best. After some reading, I reset the MTU to “Auto”. The current behavior seems more responsive, the lines seem less prone to saturation and yet file transfers and video occur faster and other requests at the same time (web surfing) also seem to work better now. Is there any downside to MTU “Auto”? Is this the proper setting?

LTE addition
The LTE Fuzion is a legacy from before the second DSL line (which wasn’t available a few years ago). It has a 20Gb data cap, and what I would like to do is divert all of the file transfers and video through the DSL lines and just have the LTE for page loading and other functions that it might be able to do faster (up to the 20 Gb), along with being the fallback for everything if the DSL lines go belly up. In the fallback condition I will not be worried about the data cap. I have done some reading on proportional rules, but am still not entirely sure how this would work and if the granularity I am after is available? I have found the LTE to be extremely variable on speeds and assume that the Balance will divert everything to the DSLs if the LTE gets slow?

Thanks in advance, I have been highly pleased and impressed with your product.

2

As long as the auto MTU negotiation work fine for the WAN and there should be no downside for the settings.

You should consider to use “Bandwidth Allowance Monitor” to disconnect the WAN when quota limit hit. This will help you to disconnect the WAN and allow fall back/ fail-over when data limit hit. Priority outbound policy can be defined to send all related traffics to LTE WAN and fall back to DSL when quota limit hits.

Thank You

3

Have the identical setup you have!!

I think you might find the Verizon runs faster than you expect. I get up to 45 Mbs downloads on it. Lot of help from his forum writing rules so that the kids devices including xboxes ect get the dsl lines, and my Roku as well as my wife and my laptops get the Verizon. Works great.

Cheetadriver, what health check do you use for your dsl lines what frequencies, ping vs lookup, etc?? That is one problem I am having trying to determine which works best.

thx

4

One other thing, you have to open a ticket and they will convert the Bal30 config file so you can upload it directly to you Bal50 when you get it . Makes the upgrade process a lot easier.

cheers!

5

First off, I wanted to thank Sitloongs and Shadowboxer for their replies. Those certainly started me in the right direction.

So I have come up with a couple of rules so far and thought I would toss them out for comment. The first couple are Live, Office and Google. They all are priority rules and put those 3 domains on the LTE line (I now have my Balance 50 in play), with the other WAN ports as lower priority. My thought here was that I wanted to put the sites that I use a lot and that are secure sites (and therefore can’t take advantage of load balancing) going down the fastest line. These are my email sites, and using web email all day means I stay on them a lot and like to have very responsive connections. The downside here is that I send out a lot of manuals, and I don’t think I can split the upload on an HTTPS connection through one of the land lines. Please correct me if I am wrong here.

I had thought about making that rule just for all HTTPS sites, but many sites have gone to HTTPS to make their Google rankings go up. At least initially, I thought I wanted to make it more tightly controlled, I may later go for something more general.

The next rule is a weighted balance rule for any traffic set to go through the first 3 WAN ports (port 4 is the LTE and set to 0)

The bottom rule is the default HTTPS Persistence Rule. My question here was if I needed to move it above the Weighted Balance Rule?

So far, this is giving me fast email and low usage of the LTE, along with good usage of the 3 DSL lines for Video streaming and downloads for updates and such. I was downloading map updates and OS updates and had all 3 lines saturated, yet was still getting excellent email. I had one mapping update that would only download across one WAN connection, I am assuming that was through an HTTPS connection (and one of the reasons I was hesitant about making an HTTPS rule instead of the domain based ones).

Again, the hardware has worked flawlessly. Getting my head around some of these concepts has been interesting, but learning new things is always a gift.

Also, to Shadowboxer, I have just been using the default DNS lookup health check on the DSL lines. I have not had a problem yet, have you been seeing one?

Edit: The Verizon Home Fuzion (Technicolor TG790) dropped out this morning (Internet showing yellow). While I was still getting some amazingly slow data through it (4kbs MAX) the unit was still showing as active on the Balance, even though it was unusable for actual work. Is there something to the health check settings I can do to make this show up as offline in this condition? I had to manually disconnect it this morning so I could check email. My health check settings are

DNS lookup
5 sec
60 sec
3
3

6

This should be the correct ways setting up the rule (Domain Name). The rule should be more specific compare to a generic rule. You can define more specific rules to use LTE line if you find the usage is low. This will allow you to control again the LTE line usage.

You should make HTTPS Persistence Rule above the Weighted Balance Rule. HTTPS Persistence Rule is important for connections that need to retain persistently (Source IP for WAN). You can defined “Load Distribution” to load balance the source IP (Clients) using the available WANs. “Persistent by source” may not work well if you only have one IP (Client) for your network. As you will see that the client will always using 1 single WAN for the HTTPS connections. “Persistent by Destination” may help on this case.

P/S: Some websites may not work well when using “Persistent By Destination”. You can defined exception rule for those websites.

You can define more domain that high priority to you using the LTE line.

Base on the description, suspected that the DNS lookup health still successful when slow data for the WAN connection, thus WAN fail-over unable to detected. Do consider use other health check method like Ping/HTTP.

7

HTTP health check worked a treat. Now if I could keep the LTE up long enough to check the good side…