Hi guys, I have been using my hap lite for 4 years now but all I have been doing is managing my home network with simple queues so that I can game while others browse.
Anyway Internet being bad in a country like South Africa and the options are limited I wanted to know if the following is possible.
Lets have two internet connections called A and B, A is uncapped but has bad reception during peak hours, B is capped but is the best network.
Would it be possible for me to route all Gaming Traffic via connection B and all other traffic example downloads, streaming, browsing via connection A? Without changing the IP range of the network and applying the same simple queues?
I will obviously have 2 internet routers and the one mikrotik, if it could work how will I start doing this? Have both connect separately to the mikrotik or to a switch with one connection to the mikrotik?
Definitely a separate cable to each modem. If one of the modems gets a public IP, I’d say switch it to bridge mode and run a PPPoE client on the Mikrotik itself, but as the Mikrotik is a hAP lite, doing so might affect performance. It depends on the bandwidth of the links.
Other than that, google for “policy routing”. If you just want some traffic to go always via WAN A and some trafic to go always via WAN B, no backing up one WAN by the other, it is as simple as adding a default route via the IP of WAN B’s modem with routing-mark=gaming, and using mangle rules to assign that routing-mark to the traffic you want to use that WAN. The complex part is to find the right criteria to decide which traffic should go which way, so you may find the easiest way to be to set one LAN port to use WAN A and the other one to use WAN B, or you may choose by source IP (gaming console will have a reserved DHCP lease and the new-routing-mark=gaming will be assigned for src-address=the.ip.of.the.console.
Thank you for the reply, I have on my network 4 computers and 4 cellphones and say a tv box, if only I can direct the gaming traffic from the computers connection B that is best for gaming and if I browse, stream or download on the computer the traffic must go to connection A which will be slower but uncapped then ill be happy. Ill be able to give the modems any IP.
So setting the connections to different LAN ports won’t work because I have connections on different LAN ports and wireless that must be treated the same, it is only the internet traffic I want to direct to be able to make use of the Uncapped connection as the Capped connection is expensive and I am running out of data to soon.
In that case, you’ll have to find out on your own how to translate the simply-looking criteria “gaming traffic” to a list of destination IP addresses and/or source&destination port combinations, maybe domain names, which can be used by the firewall to mark the gaming traffic to use the capped connection. There are many types of traffic associated to gaming, so there is no general advice how to reliably distinguish gaming traffic from other one using just the above parameters. If you plan to use a single device for both gaming and other type of traffic, you’ll have to observe using Wireshark what traffic appears when you start playing and disappears when you stop. It’s a kind of a game itself.