I have not previously used Static IP for my WAN settings. Previously I have used PPOE to connect with my IP through a transparent bridge modem.
Now I have added LEDE project routers between my transpartently bridged modems and my Peplink Balance 50. These are added to control bufferbloat with luci-app-sqm. A single router on one WAN works just fine but adding more than one makes pages take a long time to load. A single router added by itself reduces buffer bloat and often the connection on the WAN with the single router has the lowest latency. Each LEDE router has been tested individually for access to the internet, internet speeds, and bufferbloat and all are doing great.
When I use Static IP in more than one WAN they connect and remain connected with green lights in the dashboard, but latencies get very long and I have never managed to go over the speed of a single WAN.
Every static IP is the same - the IP of my Peplink. Is there a problem with this? The LEDE routers have DHCP turned off and a reserved static IP for the Peplink. The LEDE routers get numbers 1-4, and the Peplink gets number 5. It seems to me that this allows the LEDE routers to find the PEPLINK but not get into DHCP conflicts
On the Peplink most equipment has static IPs that start at 10 and above. DHCP assignment starts at 150 for any equipment that does not have an assigned static IP.
Each WAN lists the IP address of the attached LEDE router as the DNS server. Perhaps this results in every WAN looking up DNS and this is a problem? Maybe only one WAN should list DNS servers. It would seem strange if this is the problem as I have had 4 WANs connected by PPOE and used the DNS servers on each.
Currently the system is not usable with multiple LEDE routers as latencies become so low that often speedtests do not load.
Having the exact same WAN IP on each interface is not supported. It should be something like:
WAN1 = 192.168.1.x
WAN2 = 192.168.2.x
WAN3 = 192.168.3.x
WAN4 = 192.168.4.x
If it were me, I would let the Peplink be the DNS server. It can cache information for ALL the links which would make the cache much more useful.
Imagine you load Facebook. Your first request goes out WAN1 - so now the Lede router knows who Facebook.com is, but the other three don’t. It is possible that your next request will go down WAN2. Instead of grabbing the address from the cache - it has to go to the DNS server on the internet. Scales out to 4 WANS - you can see how inefficient it is.
From what I have learned about google DNS is that it rarely resolves to the closest IP to me. My ISP has arrangements with many popular web services so that the traffic never has to leave the ISP network. Google public DNS will never return those addresses. My point is - why not use the ISP DNS from your service provider? They might have better routes to less used servers. Just a thought… good luck with your battles. I am very curious how you get it all set up. I have a gaming router that I am going to put in between my Peplink and one of my WAN links as well.
Peplink is caching my DNS but I find that I must use the ip address of the LEDE router to which a Peplink WAN connects or DNS is not found. Hopefully the Peplink will cache the links visited by each router and thereby decrease the redundancy in lookups.
Good idea on using a local DNS server, I’ll give it a try.
