There are a number of reasons why I like Bing over Google, but the main reason is because Bing pays me for each search I make and Google doesn’t. It’s worth just under a penny per search, but it’s not nothing consider I do a number of searches daily and also use it as a decent news source. The Bing rewards pays for all of my Skype usage, which is probably about $5/month and once in a while, I grab $5 Amazon or Target gift cards.
I find the quality of the content to be similar *most* of the time. I do searching on Google probably less than 5% of the time – mostly for doing reverse lookup of phone numbers that call me.
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.
If you’re in a situation where it appears to take forever to open a PowerShell prompt, Internet access might be the problem.
The easiest resolution at this point appears to allow Internet access to the machine. If that is not possible, you can disable the check for the publisher’s certificate revocation. You can do this from Internet Explorer (or Control Panel, Internet Options) by clicking on Tools, Internet Options. Under the Security section of the Advanced tab, uncheck “Check for publisher’s certificate revocation”.
NOTE: These type of security features are in place for a reason. Take caution when considering disabling these.
