I want to use a Peplink Balance 30 as a load balancing router for my entire network. The Balance is on one side of a ethernet bridge with ISPs on both sides.
Connectivity and load balancing work fine for hosts patched to the Balance switch. Hosts patched to the other side of the bridge can ping the Balance WAN interface but can’t access the gateway.
The Balance offers no option to bridge the LAN and WAN ports. Do devices featuring “Drop-In Mode” support this?
What is the best way to have the Balance access an ISP and route to the LAN over a single cable?
a network diagram might bring some clarity here, but is the issue that there is a single ethernet bridge and you want the users on either side of the bridge to have load balanced internet access but the ISP routers are physically located in either location?
What is the available bandwidth on each ISP connection? What is the bandwidth available on the bridge?
Can you run VLANs across the bridge?
..is the issue that there is a single ethernet bridge and you want the users on either side of the bridge to have load balanced internet access but the ISP routers are physically located in either location?
Yes, that’s the only issue.
What is the available bandwidth on each ISP connection? What is the bandwidth available on the bridge?
One ISP provides around 6.5Mbps downstream / 600Kbps upstream–the other around 12Mbps / 5 from the Balance internal modem.
Most of the hosts accessing internet are on the side of the bridge with the slower ISP. The Balance needs to stay where it is for the radio.
The bridging hardware can practically maintain constant total throughput of 250Mbps.
The router is a Balance 30 Pro with specified 400Mbps throughput.
Can you run VLANs across the bridge?
Yes. The hardware across the bridge is specified for 802.11q.
Thank you MartinLangmaid for the suggestion and the diagram.
I hoped to avoid installing managed switches as the Balance 30 promised to be an elegant all-in-one solution for me (modem, load balancing router, POE switch, AP).
If anyone knows of another Peplink router with internal modem that can bridge LAN and WAN interfaces, please post here.
Can you draw the topology you are looking to achieve? As I can’t immediately visualise how bridging WAN and LAN on a single Balance router would help you here…
If you could cope with location b having a different subnet to location a, you could just plug the WAN of the balance into the ethernet bridge and setup dhcp on the ISP router at B to assign the balance wan IP as the gateway.
This is the the intended topology on my bench before moving the router across an ethernet bridge.
–a patch cable from a LAN port on Router A to a WAN port on Peplink Balance. As it stands, a host patched to Router A can ping Peplink Balance but not hosts patched to its LAN ports (not pictured), and specifying it as the gateway routes no internet.
What am I missing?
Hosts patched to Peplink Balance have internet connectivity with load balancing across ISP A and ISP B.
I don’t care which router serves DHCP. I don’t mind separate subnets with static routes. I just need Peplink Balance to route to the LAN over its WAN port. Adding managed switches as suggested above works, but I hope not to do this for a few reasons.
If you could cope with location b having a different subnet to location a, you could just plug the WAN of the balance into the ethernet bridge and setup dhcp on the ISP router at [A] to assign the balance wan IP as the gateway.
I’ve done exactly this with no connectivity to internet nor Peplink Balance LAN hosts for hosts connected to Router A.
I suspect the WAN port is set as NAT (which is default) so inbound routing to it will not pass.
You will net to set the Balance WAN port to IP forwarding and add a static route to RouterA for 192.168.0.0/24 with the WAN IP of the Balance as the next hop.
Thanks for the troubleshooting help MartinLangmaid.
The Balance is set to “IP forwarding”. There is no type of LAN filtering or QOS or any other such service running at Router A. A static route at Router A is set to the network IP with the Balance WAN IP set to next hop as you prescribe. There is no routing taking place by Balance with it specified as the gateway.
Static routing from Router A to an alternate router patched to its switch for testing is working fine.
Replacing Router A with an alternate router provides the same partial connectivity–no connectivity to Balance LAN or internet.
OK, so maybe we just need to clarify the default route for traffic from 192.168.0.0/24.
Add two outbound policies on the Balance. The first is a destination:any source:IP network with a subnet of 192.168.0.0/24enforce rule with the ISP WAN as the path. The second (which sits above the first) is destination 192.168.0.0/24 source Anyenforce rule with the other WAN as the path.
