Hi All,
I am able to ping my mt for around 3 minutes and then am unable to until around 3 minutes pass.
Am I load balancing correctly?
Please see my setup in attached file.
Thanks and regards
Shaun
Hi shaunw,
Your problem is that both routes that are being assigned to your MK have equal distances. That means your router will use either route from time to time. So let’s say you ping pppoe-1’s IP address it will be routed out pppoe-1 for a while, then it will be routed out pppoe-2 even though you are still pinging the IP of pppoe-1. This normally isn’t a problem, except certain ISP’s (like the ones in SA) won’t accept source IP’s from one connection coming down a different connection. The only way to fix this is to make a new static route that will always use a particular gateway. This unfortunately won’t help you load balance.
Try this, it should sort out your problem:
/ip route add gateway=pppoe-1 distance=1 disabled=no dst-address=0.0.0.0/0 scope=20 target-scope=5
hope this helps.
Sorry, I only saw your reply today (I have now ticked the “Notify ..reply is posted” option). Thank you for the most informative reply. Are you suggesting that I add the route you describe to my existing setup? Thanks Shaun
How will this line of config help the situation?
Can someone explain the following (http://www.mikrotik.com/testdocs/ros/3.0/ip/route.php ) :
scope (integer: 0..255) - a value which is used to recursively lookup the nexthop addresses. Nexthop is looked up only through routes that have scope <= target-scope of the nexthop
target-scope (integer: 0..255) - a value which is used to recursively lookup the next-hop addresses. Each nexthop address selects smallest value of target-scope from all routes that use this nexthop address. Nexthop is looked up only through routes that have scope <= target-scope of the nexthop
And this as well needs explanation:
ECMP (Equal Cost Multi-Path) Routing
This routing mechanism enables packet routing along multiple paths with equal cost and ensures load balancing. With ECMP routing, you can use more than one gateway for one destination network (this approach may also be configured to provide failover). With ECMP, a router potentially has several available next hops towards a given destination. A new gateway is chosen for each new source/destination IP pair.
Will the source/destination IP pair remain the same in the next connection that is made between them? This is important for a lot of applications, to communicate to a server/node via the same IP address with given credentials for example. And if not, how can we accomplish this important feature by using ECMP?