Why do you really need this? When Shibby first put out the firmware with MultiWAN support, I questioned why someone would pay for 2 service providers. Too much bandwidth utilization? If you need more bandwidth, just upgrade your line with your current ISP. It would be cheaper than getting a new line!
Do you need reliability? When you work from home and need to be connected to the Internet for your work and it’s not available, that’s when you might look into a solution like this one! I have Comcast Business. Does that help? No, not really when the problems is with the infrastructure and not a misconfiguration or something internal. It just means that when you call, you talk to someone a little more competent and you can get a person quicker than going through the phone system. You can have someone come on-site a little faster too. That said, the service is the same as that of all other consumers. After a few rains and a couple of Comcast outages (not exactly outages, but huge degradations in service), I started to think about getting a second provider. Luckily, in San Francisco, we have a few options for service providers here. I happen to be lucky enough to have access to 2 different cable providers, Comcast and Wave Broadband (formerly Astound). I used Astound before. It was not bad. My experience was not nearly as bad as what the Yelp reviews say. I’ve now had them for a couple of weeks and still have the same opinion. They seem to be just fine.
So, moving onto the implementation. As you can see from the screenshot, Shibby makes it easy! First configuration the VLAN. It points to a link for where to do it – in advanced settings. You can look at the next screenshot to see an example of the VLAN being set up. I’m using LAN port 1 for the 2nd WAN port.
In this screen however, You might notice my “Load Balance Weight”. The problem with my service providers is that Comcast gives me unlimited bandwidth. Wave Broadband does not. Because of this, I want more connections to go out of the first WAN link and Shibby gives us a couple of ways to do it. First is with “Load Balance Weight”. I’m just setting the 1st link to 2 and 2nd WAN link to 1. You can play with the numbers to try finding your desired balance.
Another place to do load balancing is by pinning a particular host to a particular WAN link. For example, I have some traffic I want out of 1 WAN link and some out of another. This way, I can tell my highest traffic hosts to go through WAN1 while some others through WAN2.
Here’s a status window to show that I have both WANs connected.
Lastly, you can see from different searches of what’s my IP, that both WAN links are being utilized.
Please post your comments and share!
do you know how to setup more than two DNS IPs?
Sure. Go into the Administration/Scripts on the left side and then in the Init box, run the commands:
echo “nameserver x.x.x.x” > /etc/resolv.dnsmasq
echo “nameserver y.y.y.y” >> /etc/resolv.dnsmasq
echo “nameserver z.z.z.z” >> /etc/resolv.dnsmasq
I haven’t tested this, but I think it will allow you for 3 DNS IPs for your clients.
I have tried to setup multiple wan but fail to get any connection to work. Would be willing to help me? I’ll write you all the details if you reply.
Do you need to setup mac addresses?
Once I have done this, tomato has connection and can ping addresses, but I don’t have any connection from LAN, other than connection to tomato router. Do you know why?
I don’t know. I haven’t experienced that issue. Are you using DHCP? Are one of your links down? Does the host have the default gateway configured properly?
Hey it’s me again, I found the solution to get connections working. Two connections happen to have same subnetmask. I changed the other one and now they connect with DHCP.But I face another new problem.
I have 2x 50Mbps connections. When I have only one connection active I get about 50Mbps, but when load balance then both WAN connections speeds instantly drops down to 20Mpbs. This will result in 20Mbps + 20Mbps = 40Mbps. As far as I understood it should be 50Mbps + 50Mbps = 100Mbps?
I have tested speeds with several different protocols, including those that can use multiple connections. For example downloading UbuntuOS with torrent achieve about the same speed if I use both WAN connections in load balance or only one.
Why do I get so bad speeds with two WAN connections active? . Is there some additional setup required? I will provide any information that is necessary to get this working.
That’s interesting. I’ve seen my speed drop, but thought it was only cause I had gone from 55 to 20 (my WAN speeds). I haven’t seen it come down so much. I never get 75. I only get one (55) or the other (20) and it appears to work for me.
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/tomato-multiwan.71978/page-4
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/vlan-mess.72648/#post-286754
I am having an issue just even getting the first step to “commit” and save the removing of Port from default VLAN (br0). From the forums it seems there’s a bug in v138.
Which version did you use here and anyone else who found success in doing this –
Please share which Release and Router did you use to follow the above procedure and make it work?
Thanks for a great blog post!
To answer John Snow, you won’t get the combination of both lines’s speeds (100 Mbps)over a single download, because any given TCP connection will be routed back based on whichever source IP address (WAN interface address) was chosen when you connected to that host.
You may find some download apps that create multiple connections would load-balance across both WAN links, and browsers may also do this in some cases (though HTTP/2 makes this less likely perhaps).
To really get 100 Mbps from 2 x 50 Mbps links, you would have to use “WAN bonding” in which you have two routers, one at home and one “in the cloud”, with the latter serving both WAN links and providing source IP address to servers you connect to. Then all packets come back to the “in the cloud” router and are load-balanced across the two WAN connections. See http://velocomms.com/wan-link-aggregation-and-wan-load-balancing/ for one example.
I’m using the R7000 and v138. I don’t remember exactly how I changed it from LAN to WAN, but remember it being very easy.
Checked that with N66U and that didn’t worked at all. On connected devices end anything beyond router doesn’t exist. On router end it looks like just one wAN is accessible, second wasn’t working. Tried with static IP and DHCP with devices on the same subnet mask. On router was 192.168.8.1 and second 192.168.8.254. Is there any step by step – this just doesn’t work
Why did you have 2 IP addresses for the router? You should have 2 separate WAN IPs as you can see from my video. One day, I may reset the router and create a step by step video.
I ended up using a Mikrotik router to handle dual WAN connections with failover – it has some nice features, though it’s not as easy to configure as Tomato, so some networking experience is useful. (Model was MikroTik RouterBoard hEX RB750Gr3 which includes the OS, router only – other models include WiFi).
I installed Tomato on a netgear 6300v2 and the Wan2,3,4 wont select when i try to enable/setup dual wan. Can anyone help??
Did you create the other vlan?
Next time Shibby releases, I’ll make a video on how to configure it all from scratch
This doesn’t work. As soon as I click ‘2 WAN’ in ‘Network’, the internet stops working. Even if I have ‘2 WAN’ enabled and disable the second WAN, it doesn’t work.
It does work. I’ve been using it for over a year. Did you set up the vLANs?
Yes, I set it up exactly as it’s said here and everywhere else on the internet. As soon as I turn on ‘2 WAN’ the internet stops working.
What was the other guy saying about changing subnet masks? That’s not in the post or in the videos I found on YouTube. Do I need to do that? How do I do that?
Do you see both public IPs? Do a trace route or set the policy to go through a particular WAN to make sure 1 works and then try the other.
Should VID be 0 or equal to VLAN number for each? I.e, VLAN 1, VID = 0, VLAN 2 / VID = 0, VLAN 3 / VID = 0, or should the VIDs be 1, 2, 3.
From the status menu, it shows both WANs working. But nothing works through the internet with both enabled. I tried routing all traffic through one or the other WAN and it doesn’t do anything. The only way it works again is if I go back to the ‘1 WAN’ setting.
Tracert shows nothing when I switch to ‘2 WAN’. On 1 WAN it works like normal. On 2 WAN, it starts giving * * * Request timed out immediately after the first IP (which is the router itself).
When I changed the subnet mask on one of the ISP modems (I only have access to one) to 255.255.255.128, the ISP modem reset and refused to get an IP address until I changed it back to 255.255.255.0.
Both WANs have 255.255.255.0 subnet masks.
My VLAN settings are exactly as they are in the posting. Does your overview page show both public IPs? I use DHCP for both WAN links.
My overview page shows both public IPs and has DHCP set for both.
I’ve tried just about everything in routing and VLAN settings, nothing works.
I’m using advancedtomato v3.5-140 AIO 64k for what it’s worth (so people know which version to not use).
Which are you using?
Tomato by Shibby. http://Tomato.groov.pl
That’s the same place I got it from. Which version are you running, do you know?
Btw, I reflashed Asus’ firmware and it works with Dual WAN. Load balancing is pathetic, but it works.
So using default Asus firmware (but the latest version which is May 2018), I put my connections in load balance. I used the routing table to assign one of my two newsgroup providers to secondary WAN, then when I download in a program like Grab-It for example, i can manually just assign 1/2 or 2/3 of the files to the secondary WAN. This hits about 70-75% of my combined speed, which is still significantly greater than each individual WAN on its own.
Or in more clear language,
WAN 1 = Ranges from 100 to 180 Mbps, average is probably closer to 150 Mbps (14-18 MB/s in Grab-It)
WAN 2 = Constant 120-125 Mbps (14 MB/s constant in Grab-It)
Combined using the above = ~200-225 Mbps average/consistent download (Peaks at 25-26 MB/s in Grab-It)
I think I could hit higher if I used enough connections in the download program. I have not yet tried torrents.
The built-in load balancing on its own seems pretty weak honestly.
Now the only problem is the routing table for Dual WAN on Asus firmware is weak and only takes IP addresses, not ports. So I’m not sure how to route the connection for gaming over the lower latency WAN.
I might have to try another version of Tomato again.
I’ve found other threads with people complaining of similar symptoms (Re: Tomato), but I don’t think mine was a VLAN out of order problem, since the Overview page showed both WANs connected with Public IPs displayed.
http://www.linksysinfo.org/index.php?threads/cant-get-dual-wan-to-work-on-asus-rt-ac66u.73220/
You won’t get better with Tomato. The load balancing is by host, so you will only be using 1 WAN at a time per host.
^ So Tomato can’t max out two connections while using one host/computer?
Nope
Well, Asus’ firmware comes close to doing that.
I tried downloading other versions of Tomato, from the official link (not Advanced Tomato) and the same issue.
I can actually ping internet locations via Router’s menu, from both WANs. But the LAN (any of them) and WAN do not seem to connect to one another once I put it into ‘2 WAN’ mode.
I figured out that one of my ISPs is behind a router that I do not have access to. So I cannot put that in ‘Bridged’ mode as I did with my second connection.
If anyone else reads this and is having these problems: Try Merlin, or Asus’ firmware which lets you run Dual WAN load balance and failover with no issues, no matter what kind of connection you’re on. The routing ability is pretty weak but it works and is the best way to manually load balance if that’s what you’re going for. You can easily max a connection if that’s what you’re going for. I don’t know if it’s possible over Bit Torrent though.
Interestingly, when I tried Asus-Merlin, I couldn’t get my 2nd WAN link to connect via DHCP – it just wouldn’t get an address. Maybe I’ll try it again another time.
Hi!
Have you tried FreshTomato – https://freshtomato.org?
Yup! I use it now! Shibby’s is no longer being updated.