I posted this in Beginners basics and didnt receive any views nor responses, therefore, I hope to have a response here. Thank you.
I need help setting up what I believe is a very unique network architecture for an ISP.
Firstly, access to bandwidth is very limited in my country. So to tackle this issue I want to use the Ethernet bonding feature on RouterOS to bond as many DSL connections as possible and this will be used as my internet uplink. The issue is not all of the DSL connections are in one place, so, some of the DSL connections are where the router is located. We want to setup a situation where we can bond 4 DSL connections in one location and using a ptp wireless link back to the main router location use that along with the DSL links at the main site to makeup the Entire WAN uplink.
After doing that I would like to know how to configure the routerOS to properly handle voip connection and configure a QoS for our VoIP service.
Then, I want to configure a PPPoE service on the main router. However, I want to be able to give clients netspeed within the local network while restricting bandwidth speeds to the subscribed plans outside of the local network.
The setup should be able to prevent customers from changing their IP addresses to get faster speeds or otherwise access more bandwidth than intended.
Please let me know how I can do this and how I can perform checks and balances to ensure that all configuration is correct and that we aren’t losing revenue due to an exploitation.
Thank you for you assistance in advance. I am new to RouterOS. Please be patient with me.
Let me stop you there. Load Balancing is almost always a preferable strategy to Bonding, in terms of flexibility and fail-over. With Load Balancing, you don’t have to get all your connections from the same provider; your (one) provider doesn’t have to let you set up equipment to bond the connections at their end; you can mix connections with different speeds/latencies; and if one of the connections fails, the rest will keep working.
I understand that balancing is much easier to set up and manage, but the downside is that it will look like multiple IP addresses from the outside, and any single connection (like a big upload) is limited to the speed of the link that it is assigned.
What is the latest status of bonding support (packet level) in RouterOS? Which algorithms for balancing and monitoring are available?
The following link documents v3 and v4 - has anything happened since then?
I am very new to mikrotik, I do however have experience with setting up openvpn for various uses. One of the applications here is to simplify the multiple gateway issue(I’ve recently learnt that the ‘per connection classifier’ in routerOS can fix this as well) and get rid of the annoying dynamic IP assignments from the ISP. It also hides who is your uplink for the more curious users.
I would like to know when bonding or balancing if the default config on the router needs to be disbanded?
I think the greatest benefit of the VPN is that true bonding will occur(my own opinion!) where the links will be actually bonded… I should have an update within a few weeks as I am going to attempt to bond 2 10mbps/1mbps connections with the VPN and see what happens.
Thank you for your input. It was my understanding which is truly subjection to correction, that the ethernet bonding feature on RouterOS allows for failover, where, if a connection fails the rest keeps working, my intention was to use a VPN(if it will help to make all the links appear to be from the same network to the mikrotik), the VPN server has a 1GBPS internet uplink which is more than enough. It was also my understand that by doing this I will not need to have the ISP do anything on their end as all bonding occurs on the router. I am not using MLPPP.
Please let me know, your input is greatly appreciated.
With a bonded interface, your router divides outbound traffic between multiple DSLs (inverse multiplexing); there must be a device at the other end of those circuits recombines them into the original data stream (inverse demultiplexing).
What you are describing sounds like load-balancing, encapsulated under OVPN to present a single WAN address. In that case you’ll still need a VPN server for your router to connect to via your DSLs, and the connection will behave like a load-balanced connection rather than bonded (e.g., any single session will still be limited to the speed of a single DSL) because that is the underlying architecture. But while bonding requires that all the circuits emerge at the same location to be inverse-demux’ed together, in theory you could put your other VPN server in any data center. But then you’d be paying for the server, and possibly for the data center’s bandwidth that you use, in addition to the DSLs.
A question still lingers, is it possible to do bonding with a VPN server? And yes, my design did have a OVPN server included, which is already running btw.
Can you enlighten me on how to get either done? I am very new to mikrotik. I already have two wan connections and waiting for two more lines to be installed but I have no idea how to bond or load balance them.
I’m not an expert on OVPN, but I’d be very surprised if it supported true bonding; e.g., to combine two 10Mbps circuits into a single ~20Mbps bonded circuit that can be used by a single connection.
You can load-balance so that some connections use one 10Mbps circuit and other connections use the other 10Mbps circuit–and probably use OVPN so that connections via either circuit have the same public IP. You’ll have ~20Mbps total capacity, but only 10Mbps will be available to any one connection. Check out this page, especially the ECMP and PCC sections.