Dual WAN Connectivity

[David Wolfe]

Hello all,

I just had a secondary ISP connection brought into my home (at least for a while). I've tried to enable the connection on my ASUS AC5300 RT with limited success. Was wondering if what I'm seeing is a known issue...

-Primary WAN port is connected to my Comcast link (this was the existing connection I've had for a while and it's been solid)
-Secondary WAN is now in Ethernet port 4 (new connection from MetroNet - fiber based)

After enabling Dual WAN and specifying port 4 as the new secondary WAN port, the secondary connection won't get an IP. "Lease time" status always shows as "Renewing..."

However, if I flip the WAN connection (config-wise in the router - cables are not being flipped) to be Ethernet port 4 as the primary, it gets an IP just fine and now the Comcast link in the WAN port is in the perpetual "Renewing..." state. So, I know the link is good on both connections and each can get an IP if they are primary.

Is this how a failover config is handled for ASUS (Merlin) firmware? The secondary doesn't get an IP until the primary is offline?

Thanks for any info all.

-David

 

[David Wolfe]

Update: The failover does seem to work if I pop the cable on the primary connection but it takes 30-60 seconds to switch to the secondary. The secondary's status seems to generate an error saying something like "ISP has given an invalid DHCP response" but that eventually resolves and the secondary link does come online.

So, it's not a fast and seamless switch over unfortunately. I haven't tried the load balanced approach since the interface warns that AIProtection will be disabled on a load balanced config and I use AIProtection fairly heavily for my family protection.

 

[whitey019]

It has been a while since I've messed with dual WAN capability, but I seem to remember being able to adjust, at least to some extent, how quickly the switch-over takes place. Both to and from the primary. You have to be careful with the settings, because you wouldn't want the switch over/back to be too sensitive. You potentially could get in a weird state if a few dropouts happened in quick succession.

 

[David Wolfe]

Yeah. I don't want the router flapping between connections so I'm going to leave those settings as-is. Just a little annoying that it's behaving like it is. I even tried to disable Internet access on the primary WAN link in the router config hoping to cause it to flip to the secondary but no love. It just told me "No Internet Access" and never brought up the 2nd WAN link.

Thanks for the reply though!

 

[whitey019]

Admittedly, I haven't tried it in a year or more, but when I tried it the the switch over worked perfectly, albeit a little slow, that is why I know about the parameters. I my case, I was using a USB tethered cell phone.