I am very new to the routerboard OS and am in need of advice. I purchased two of these units that will be load balancing over two interconnects. The interconnects are a 100mb VDSL2+ adapter and a “gigabit” Ethernet over power adapter. I would like to use the two hEX units I just bought to load balance between them with fail over (as the Eop adapters don’t work without power).
I am looking to set them ip with port 1 connected to my switch. There are multiple vlans running on this switch so I need all traffic forwarded through this setup, no routing at this time besides the load balancing.
I would like port 1 to be the switch port on both units. The 100mb dsl on port 4 and port 5 will be the Eop adapter. I would like the link weighted more towards the Eop adapter than the DSL.
I looked at the documentation regarding the units and I am confused on how to remove the routing internet function and just turn the unit into a switch with said functions.
Any advice on documentation or sample setup would be greatly appreciated.
I take it no one has advice? I have reset these units so many times to count. I have tried disabling routing and going switch, but then I loose connection to manage the device.
you can use winbox connecting by mac address to recover management
Didn’t know about that. Thanks for that.
Though, am I on the right track with the setup for what I am looking for? Switching with weighed load balancing?
maybe a graphic explaining your proposed network topology can help
Untitled.png
So, on the drawing I am looking for all vlan tagging to be passed through. No 9000 jumbo framing is passed though, just 1500 with vlan tagging (think that’s 1504 then). I am not in need of routing right now of QoS. Maybe at some point, but not right now. The two adapters are used since the only way I have to link back to my network in a basement is via the EoP and DSL interlinks.
Yellow: Port 1 on hEX and the main backhaul to both switches
Green: Port 4 on hEX
Blue: Port 5 on hEX
Looking to do weighed load-balancing over the green and blue lines weighed to the faster EoP adapters. If power fails though, I need all traffic to go over the DSL link until power is restored, then the weights will play into it again.
Why not use these devices:
https://www.actiontec.com/products/datasheets/ECB6200%20Product%20Sheet.pdf
These give true gigabit capacity over your Coax network. They even support multipoint configuration.
Do your switches support spanning tree? If so, just connect them directly and set the cost of the vdsl interface to be worse than the moca interface.
This will be much much cleaner than a wild and crazy bridging solution with PCC load balancing going on with tunneled bridge over EoIP and all of that.
I unfortunately can’t use those coax adapters right now as I am using the only line I have running upstairs for the cable box we are using in the living room. I would like to sometime in the future, but not at this point. I am stuck with the adapters I have.
Thanks for the suggestion though on spanning tree. Unfortunately the switches I am using seem to have issues with that type of configuration as they are only “Smart” switches, not fully manageable ones. I have had issues with the failover not taking place properly then load-balancing after the connection returns.
As a reference to make it easier on people. I am in a condo and the basement unit where all of the equipment is stored is neither by me or below me so I am stuck with the solutions that I am using as the units were built in 81.
If you do have coax, it can put the TV signal right onto the same coax as the MOCA signal - just FYI.
You don’t have to dedicate a run of coax for the media converters.
Each converter has two f-type connectors. One goes to the wall and the other goes to your cable box. MOCA uses a different frequency band than the broadcast channels, so both can ride the same cable at once.
(although I think one of the two bands might be in use by some cable companies, so you would only get ~400Mbps if it can’t do dual-band bonding)
You’d probably also want a MOCA filter to put just upstream from your first splitter in the house coming from the curb, so your network doesn’t leak out into the neighborhood.
If I’ve misunderstood, and there’s just no coax at all in the basement, then of course that’s a no go.
You hit it right on the head with that last one. The pedestal is outside and I don’t have anything running to the basement at this time so I’d like to use the coax, but at this time I don’t have a solution to make that work.
I’ve been thinking about the PCC load balancing scenario, and I think you’re going to hit a problem if you’re trying to bridge the connection.
The routers are going to see the EoIP tunnel packets as all one big fat connection. You might try doing it on a per-packet basis, but I think the danger is if there is packet loss or too big a difference in latency, you might get out-of-order packets or something.
You could try setting up a bonding interface on both hEX routers and bond the two links into a single virtual link and then connect the physical lan interface to the bonding interface…
What you described at the end was pretty much what I was looking at doing. There is a weight option (according to the documentation) on the bonding. I was mainly wondering if I was on the correct track with my thought process of changing the devices into switches and bonding the two connections.
balance-tlb
This mode balances outgoing traffic by peer. Each link can be a different speed and duplex mode and no specific switch configuration is required as for the other modes. Downside of this mode is that only MII link monitoring is supported and incoming traffic is not balanced. Incoming traffic will use the link that is configured as “primary”.
I wanted to use the tlb version on both sides since I am going to be using hEX’s on each side the transmit on each being limited on outgoing on both. Identical setups on both sides is what I am looking to do.
Yeah - if you want vlans to go through, you’re going to have to make this a layer-2 connection (no routing).
I’m not sure how much bridging performance the hEX is going to give you, but the numbers on routerboard.com look promising.
My main concern with this kind of a setup is that the bonding interfaces are going to assume that the two links are of nearly-identical latency and performance - weighting is only going to determine how much data is sent across each physical link. Your connection may work flawlessly.
So assuming you want ether1 to be the “upstream/downstream” interface and ether2+ether3 to be bonded, you’d make the bonding interface for ether2 and ether3, then make a bridge. Attach ether1 and the bonding interface to the bridge, and put the router’s management IP address on the bridge interface as well. From IP’s perspective, these boxes will just be connected to the lan for management - the bridge will do the forwarding, and should forward all of your VLANs intact. Oh - if you’d rather the management IPs appear in a certain VLAN, then put a vlan interface on the bridge and put the management IP on that vlan interface.
Let us know how it works out for you.
Thanks both of you for all your help. I think I am going to give this a shot when I get home and see if I can get them running.
I reset both devices to have no configuration. I have added the bonding of the two ports. Bridged the bonding and eth1. I am unable to ping anything. When I remove one of the bonded ports, I am able to get online and connect to anything on the network.
Make sure the ethernet ports aren’t slave to anything (master-port=none on the bonded ethernet interfaces)
All of the interfaces are set to none. The only thing I can come up with is I’m creating a loop somewhere in my config. Does the bottom setting need to have switch one on it? That setting shows up for both 4 and 5 interfaces.
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I can’t seem to figure out how to remove interfaces 4 and 5 from the switch. I am 99% sure I am creating a loop when I use both interfaces.