Clustering RouterOS PPPoE Servers

Is it possible to cluster PPPoE servers based on RouterOS ?

Regards.

Faton

Is there a way of doing it ? any idea ?

Regards

Faton

Seems interesting to me . I thought about it , we can do something but it is not real clustering .

You can do something to this effect by using identical hardware to create two or more mikrotik routers. If they are both running a PPPoE server in the same broadcast domain, the client will connect to the first PPPoE Access Concentrator which responds. With machines running on the same hardware with the same config, connections should balance themselves between your mikrotiks.

You will need a separate pool per mikrotik, or let radius assign the IPs and run a dynamic routing protocol (like OSPF) between the mikrotiks.

freaky idea :slight_smile:

have you tried it? would be interesting if it is really loadbalancing so good

As i said it is not real load balancing . load balancing should be transparent .

Assume user1 connected to router1 and user2 connected to router2 . if router1 fails user1 will be disconnected and should again connect. It is just a simple example

ok, this is failover. easy to do even with vrrp for example.
but where is the loadbalancing? i can only think of a simple loadbalancing if one of the boxes is under heavy load and answering slower and the other one is faster at responding. but this is only working with really loaded boxes :slight_smile:
or does it really work rather good when both machines are connected to the same switch and so forth that they answer at the same time and load balance by random?

one possible solution would be a l2-loadbalancer such as the bigger f5 boxes. but i do not know how well they behave with connection tracking of pppoe-connects. but worth a test i think.

I have tried to have two pppoe servers at the same broadcast domain with the same service name, but it is not balanced equally. I think RouterOS developers should add this ability, it is good to have it. At our company we use Finepoint ServPoet pppoe servers and they support clustering, but I,m very interested to have this feature in RouterOS.

Regards.

Faton

I have tried it, we have a pool of 19 routerOS routers running on wrap boards doing exactly this.
The load seems to get fairly evenly distributed. Identical hardware is pretty important.

Load balancing with several ROS is working. Almost.
There’s one problem you can’t handle without real cluster:
serverA gets 100 users at night, serverB also gets 100 users.
But 10 users on serverA with high bandwidth start downloading torrents and server is pretty loaded.
You can’t mirate some of the users from A to B.