In my current setup I have 2 adsl lines each connected to a router operating in PPPoE bridge mode, both routers connect to a single lan interface of the mikrotik server through a switch. There is a second interface that leads to my LAN, and I do some load balancing on the server. I have managed to get both connections to operate successfully with load balancing and everything seems to be working properly.
However whenever the mikrotik server reboots only one connection is re-established, the other one tries to enter its pppoe user/pass in the wrong router’s connection resulting in a failed connection attempt, I would have to disable & enable it multiple times until it picks up the correct line. Whichever connects first seems to make the other PPPoE client interface connect through its router. Why does this happen and how can I configure it to work properly.
Additionally I’d like to add some fail-over so that if this occurs (i.e one line is down) 100% of the load goes to the other line rather than continue balancing to a dead connection.
Your issue with one connection not re-establishing is normal if your provider is ATT. I have it all the time. I have a TWC connection and an ATT connection. ATT never comes back up properly after a reboot. For me they are a cheap backup so I keep them around.
I live in egypt so I’m pretty sure I have different providers. But if what you say is true and this is a provider-side problem, is there nothing I can do to fix it short of moving the pppoe configs back to the routers ?
I would say it probably is a provider problem… however I am hoping someone else will respond to this thread and say otherwise as I would like to know for sure.
From the original description I am not clear how it is intended that the two PPPoE connections will reliably use the correct ADSL line. I generally do like to drop ADSL/VDSL etc. devices into bridge mode where possible but in this case it might be worth trying to use the two ADSL routers to establish the PPPoE connections and then use their LAN side IP addresses as the upstream routers. Alternatively, use two Routerboard ethernet interfaces - one for each ADSL router - that will ensure that the correct upstream gets the PPPoE discovery request.
My suspicion is that the current problems are caused by both PPPoE connections attempting PPPoE discovery which is seen by both ADSL bridges. It is down to chance which upstream responds first.
yeah I figured thats what was happening, so I installed another ethernet interface and moved the 2nd line there. That seems to have fixed my problem and PPPoE is working perfectly now.