pfSense Router - A little pointless story (with pictures!)

[Jay]

For 12 months I have had 2 net connections 1 x Cable and 1 x ADSL and I used to split the network via default gateway, this was fine but it did mean that most of the time the ADSL was used and the Cable just sat there and never really did anything. On saturday for no real reason I decided that I was going to setup a load balance via a pfSense router using an Atom 230 CPU, 8GB SSD and 1GB RAM. This was a good idea as I already had the hardware but I had a small issue that the motherboard had 1 NIC and I needed 3 to do what I wanted to do.

Luckly I had 2 USB --> RJ45 sticks that cost about £7 each (always handy when 200 miles from the office and find you have to fix a PC that has decided to fry its NIC) After the last time I had to get a wireless card working in Linux I had to pump myself up as I had a very nasty feeling that I would have to mess about for hours to get Linux to see the bloody things (they are not really standard kit) so I set myself half a day to get the drivers installed and then to get pfSence to actually see them.

Sitting down already feeling fed up with this "stupid Idea" I plugged one of the USB network cards in to the header on the board and then looked at the screen expecting to see "What is this? What do you think your doing plugging hardware in? This is FreeBSD my son and you are going to have to do better than that!" but to my suprise (and joy) FreeBSD detected it and pfSense added it to the interfaces! I plugged the second USB network card in and again it just worked In the words of Yoda "Happy was I"

I then used the following guide to setup the load balance

http://www.tomschaefers.org/web/wordpress/?p=538

added a few of my own rules in for HTTPs and that was it, done.

As you can see from the following pictiures the torrent use both connections as does speedtest.net I have seen it upto 2.5MB/s

pfSense Dashboard (look at the WAN / WAN2 graphs and guess what connection is the VM and what one is the O2)



uTorrent



Before Load Balance



After Load Balance



I'm not sure why I have lost a bit of upload and ignore the ISP its actually both Telewest and O2 at the same time







Next is failover but that is for another day.

[watercooled]

Cool, was interesting to read! BTW what hardware were you using before for two WAN side connections?

[Jay]

WAN is full NAT on pfSense to the cable router (Hence the 77. address) WAN2 is using NAT on the O2 router.

[watercooled]

No, I mean what were you using before pfSense for dual WAN?

[Jay]

I wasn't I used a WRT54G and the O2 router if I had any issues with O2 I could just change the default gateway to the WRT54G and get the VM connection.

I did try and draytek dual WAN but it was crap.

[watercooled]

Ah right I see why you wanted to do this then! Nice work!

[aidanjt]

That's good going.

[nightkhaos]

Cool, I have a mate would would really be interesting in setting this up.

[weebroonieuk]

ooh jay u may be able to help me with my draytek , which right now i feel is crap but probably due to me not understanding the proper voodoo to get my two telewest connections running and load balanced

if you could have a look at my thread in this section any adivce would be apreciated

[kidzer]

Thats tremendous, very cool!

[Jay]

Added some terrible pictures

[oolon]

An alturnative way to do this when you have only one NIC and a managed switch is to use VLANs and trunk in via 802.11q, you can plug in your cable and adsl into the switch on there own vlans. One thing you have to watch out for is the MTU of the NIC, vlans require a 4 byte overhead so you really need the onboard to support jumbos or extend ethernet frames. Yes to can set your dhcp server to hand out an MTU of 1496, however it seems due to the number of routers that handed out bogus values of 896, windows and linux ignore the MTU by default. One other thing to check is the MTU of your ADSL (oftain due to PPPoE) its 1492, where as your cable will give you a native 1500. I do this with my firewall which also happens to be in a VM so it can be really cut down.

[Jay]

An alturnative way to do this when you have only one NIC and a managed switch is to use VLANs and trunk in via 802.11q, you can plug in your cable and adsl into the switch on there own vlans. One thing you have to watch out for is the MTU of the NIC, vlans require a 4 byte overhead so you really need the onboard to support jumbos or extend ethernet frames. Yes to can set your dhcp server to hand out an MTU of 1496, however it seems due to the number of routers that handed out bogus values of 896, windows and linux ignore the MTU by default. One other thing to check is the MTU of your ADSL (oftain due to PPPoE) its 1492, where as your cable will give you a native 1500. I do this with my firewall which also happens to be in a VM so it can be really cut down.

Yes, this is how I did it on my VM version when I tested but as I had the USB NICs I thought I would give it a go, also the little micro ITX board could not support jumbo frames and I like the red flashing lights on the USB NICs as you can actually see activity.

[oolon]

Looking again at your pictures, how come your using the small netgear switch rather than that rather nice looking dell one with the SFP slots?

[Jay]

the dell one is a 24 port gigabit managed switch with 4 SFP slots, its the bee's knees but its so noisy its untrue!

[weebroonieuk]

do you think if i bought one of the cheap atom boards and a couple of usb dongles and a wifi module i could make the same as my draytek and follow your guide and it would combine my two cable connections ?