HAP AC3 LTE6 with WAN Primary & LTE Secondary

RouterOS Beginner Basics
1

Goal:
I want HAP AC3’s LTE6 to have both wired and LTE WANs. LTE as hot standby and failover only when wired WAN drops and failback when restored.

Environment:
For wired WAN I have xfinity cable and a netgear CAX80. The CAX80 acts as cable modem and DHCP/Router/NAT since the CAX80 is in router mode on subnet 192.168.1.xxx. So I’d like to replace the routing from Netgear CAX80 with Mikrotik’s DHCP routing NAT.

What I’ve tried:
When I start AC3 with only LTE sim, connected devices can access LTE WAN and have 192.168.88.xxx IPs

When I start AC3 with both wired WAN (CAX80) & LTE, then all devices get DHCP from CAX80 (IPs are 192.168.1.xxx). When I disconnect wired cable (or disable interface from WinBox) there is no LTE WAN connection. It’s like AC3 knows to just be a bridge for the CAX80 and nothing else.

So couple of questions:

  1. will turning CAX80 into bridge mode allow AC3 to act as router/DHCP when both CAX80 and LTE are connected?

  2. what AC3 configuration allows wired WAN to be primary and during an outage fails over to LTE? The MikroTik configs I’ve seen look like load balancer between WANs instead of hot failover standby. MikroTik support gave this link but this does not look to set wired WAN as primary…only failover (https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=26476608)

2

Yes, the ac3 can do all your asking.

Check out Para I - https://forum.mikrotik.com/viewtopic.php?t=182373

3

…thanks…?

4

Well, @anav’s “Subsection I” is basically the missing details from: https://help.mikrotik.com/docs/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=26476608

One note is for the LTE, you can use the LTE interface instead of a gateway IP address in the “recursive route” to the canary address.

5

Bullpucky.
Since when do you need to mangle when doing failover…???

6

Only point was both document “recursive routing”, maybe Mikrotik’s explanation makes more sense to the OP, dunno. But it is kinda a pick your poison situation with rules vs mangle :wink:

Worth noting that even out of the box with QuickSet… it will already do some failover between a WAN on ether1, and LTE from miniPCIe. Since a WAN connected to ether1 will use a route-distance of 1 from DHCP client by default & and APN Profile default to a distance=2. Now the big issue with the “QuickSet failover” is that it will only use LTE if the cable modem ethernet cable is physically disconnected from the router (or cable modem is turned off). That often not “good enough”, so some kinda a live-ness check is needed… and that how you get the “recursive routes” approaches. And also how you get a “thanks with a sarcastic question mark” :wink:

7

Whatever, IM outta here.
the question posed was clear,
what AC3 configuration allows wired WAN to be primary and during an outage fails over to LTE? The MikroTik configs I’ve seen look like load balancer between WANs .

I pointed to a section on primary and failover.
The first part of the link describes the basic failover, and then goes into what most people look for which is recursive.
It was reading material for the OP to digest, Not my scenario, not my requirements… Answer was appropriate. Your insinuations not appreciated…

8

Wasn’t trying to offend, just explain. All approaches are over-complicated IMO compared to competitors — so if anyone should be offended its Mikrotik for not making this easier. :wink: