Failover router and setup

[AhmedIlyas]

So, had a pretty bad day on Friday.

Woke up to comcast TV and internet not working at all (19h "scheduled" maintenance - did not know anything about it) and then T-Mobile cell service, completely not working for 7 hours as they were, apparently, "checking to see if the cell tower supports 5G"

 

total and utter BS.

 

Since I have a business and work from home most of the time... it was not good. Had to go into a clients' office to do work. And when I got back home, still nothing was working.

 

Cut the long story short:

 

I want a backup/failover internet.

 

I want it to integrate with my current config:

 

I have a nighthawk Netgear router that has my hardwired devices on there and also then has the internet modem plugged into (its not a comcast rented modem, its a modem i bought... the Motorola MB6800 I think).

I was looking at a linksys dual wan: https://www.linksys.com/us/p/P-LRT224/

 

Question is, how will this work and is it workable? What config, if any, do I need to do to make it seem less that if a provider goes down, it fails over to the other? (and to maybe have load balancing too, if possible)

Is it possible to find out, in such an event, which provider went down? 

is it also possible to set a primary/secondary or "preferred" provider which will be set in the dual WAN router? or does that not even exist? (Basically so it always tries to use the first provider and fall back to it when they come back up)

 

Possible to do DYNDNS in this situation too? I already have DYNDNS but wondering how it will work if the router fails over to the other provider

 

Thank you!

[kirashi]

3 minutes ago, AhmedIlyas said:

I have a nighthawk Netgear router

If your Netgear Nighthawk is a model that can run OpenWRT (or a variant, like DD-WRT or AdvancedTomato), it already supports failover by way of configurable WAN ports. This means you can configured 1 of the LAN ports as a secondary WAN port, then plug an ethernet cable from another providers' modem into that to use for failover. It won't be as powerful as having a dedicated piece of load balancing hardware, but it can work.

 

[AhmedIlyas]

Thank you. Sadly the model I have does not have that capability 

[AhmedIlyas]

Anyone know if answers to my questions?

 

I also want to know if it is possible to plug in another router which has LTE support, into the Dual WAN router and also plug in the netgear router into the Dual WAN router and have the netgear router still have DHCP and dyndns capabilities with the dual WAN router in full motion?

[Donut417]

2 hours ago, AhmedIlyas said:

dyndns capabilities

Not sure that will work. LTE is going to be under carrier grade NAT most likley. Not sure if Dyndns can work in that case, because the IP address your using is being used by multiple customers on the network. 

[AhmedIlyas]

That is an excellent point. I am not even sure how I managed to forget that altogether! It's been a tough week.

 

I think that would be ok temporarily. 

 

I am planning on using, after discovery, an LTE 4G backup router and use a mobile provider for backup and plug that device into the dual WAN router.

thoughts?

[Donut417]

7 minutes ago, AhmedIlyas said:

That is an excellent point. I am not even sure how I managed to forget that altogether! It's been a tough week.

 

I think that would be ok temporarily. 

 

I am planning on using, after discovery, an LTE 4G backup router and use a mobile provider for backup and plug that device into the dual WAN router.

thoughts?

I think it could work. 

[mynameisjuan]

There are routers that can do all of that, such as Mikrotik. 

 

I am curious as what you need such redundancy for? 2 ISPs and a 4g plan is going to run you quite a bit a month and depending on your use, the 4g could run you $$$ during major outages even like you just had. Point being is even large companies only begin looking at 3 WANs during zero-downtime situations, like a min=$5,000 of loss

[Donut417]

1 minute ago, mynameisjuan said:

There are routers that can do all of that, such as Mikrotik. 

 

I am curious as what you need such redundancy for? 2 ISPs and a 4g plan is going to run you quite a bit a month and depending on your use, the 4g could run you $$$ during major outages even like you just had.

He needs 2 ISP's but only can get one hard line one. So 4G LTE is pretty much his only option. 

[mynameisjuan]

4 minutes ago, Donut417 said:

He needs 2 ISP's but only can get one hard line one. So 4G LTE is pretty much his only option. 

Gotcha, I read it as 2 lines with 4g. My bad