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Two Internet connections using dual WAN router

The general idea behind 2 Internet connections is to avoid downtime during those pesky times when your ISP service is down—lots of reasons like fibre cut, hardware or software upgrade on their end etc, I’ve heard these many more times than I care to remember, but the reality is that your Internet connection goes down at some point in time. It’s really hateful when it goes down while you’re in the middle of something important. By the way, this guide for is small offices and home offices, it’s personal tech, these are not for the E1 types of connection like those found in your office.

Redundancy of Internet connections used to be out of reach for home networks because they are pricey and requires some sys admin acrobatics, but there are small routers which made it to consumer market that makes dual Internet connection possible for the home networks—you may still need to do just a little bit of sys admin acrobatics, but at least these routers are no longer pricey.

Getting another Internet connection is not really the challenge, all you’ve got to do is to get another Internet subscription and get another router—which also means that you’ve got 2 separate connections to the Internet, while it gives you redundancy of connection, it does have some challenges, here’s a quick list.

1. How to utilize both the Internet connection at the same time, such that it results to a bigger Internet pipe—the problem of load balancing
2. How to configure the 2 Internet connections such that when one fails, the other acts as a backup—this is the problem of fail over
3. How will you configure your network printer, media server and file server such that they are accessible, regardless of the Internet connection you are using—the problem shared LAN services.

Unless you’ve got serious background in LAN, WAN and routing, the painless solution is to find an Internet appliance which merges your Internet connection at a WAN (Wide Area Network) level while maintaining a single LAN, that way, the routing, load balancing, fail over and sharing of LAN services (like file and print services) are pre-configured for you—all you’ve got to do is to plug—not quite play yet—and configure just a little bit.

Here’s an example of how you might wire a dual WAN router for your home network

Generally, dual WAN routers will clearly label which ports are for WAN (sometimes they are labeled Internet) and which ones are for LAN, you can’t go wrong here, this is not the challenge, the challenge is how to configure it—will go to that bit later.

Some SOHO dual WAN routers which you might find in your trusty computer shop are DLink LB604 and Linksys RV042, I wasn’t able to use Linksys RV042 because it was out of stock at the time I needed a dual wan router, so I went to get a DLink LB 604.

In case you got the DLink variety, the setup is quite straight forward if you just want to have the 2 Internet connections active.

Connect LB604 to a PC desktop or laptop using a LAN cable (RJ45), plug the laptop to one of the LAN ports of the LB604, connect the cables coming out of your modems (RJ45 cables) to the Internet or WAN ports of the LB604—see diagram above, that’s exactly how you should wire your network at this point.

Change the IP address of the connected PC or laptop to a static IP—you may need to do this because the LB604 may not be configured to give out IP addresses (DHCP) during the first time setup. The LAN IP address of the LB604 was 192.168.0.1, just check the documentation or manual of the LB604 which came with it’s packaging, to be sure. This means that you need to change the connected PC’s IP address to something like 192.168.0.2, you can use any number from 2 to 254 on the last dotted digit, but the first three dotted numbers has to be 192.168.0, otherwise LB604 will not be reachable from the PC. If you need a refresher on how to change the IP address of your PC, read the post on changing IP addresses.

Next, launch a browser window, and go to http://192.168.0.1 (the address of LB604). The default username is “admin” and default password is blank.

The wizard is easy to use, so you should probably click “Run Wizard”, it will guide on how to setup the 2 internet connections and change the password for admin.

Click ‘DHCP’, you might want to set this up, unless you prefer to manually set all the IP addresses of PCs connecting to the router.  Pay attention to the ‘starting IP address’ and ‘ending IP address’, I made mine starting from .4 and ending in .102, which means LB604 will only give out address within that range, if you need to add a server in your LAN which requires a static IP address, make it .105 and up to prevent IP address clashes. Click the ‘Apply’ button when you’re done.

Load balancing

At this point, the 2 Internet connections setup in LB604 is not yet joined together, you can do that from the “load balance” screen of the admin option.

Check the “enabled” tick box then decide what is the split (loading share) between your 2 Internet connections, if you’re not sure at this point, just do it at 50/50—you can only type on the WAN1 textbox, when you click ‘apply’, the WAN 2 value will be adjusted. The 50/50 split means that half of the time, WAN1 will be used, and the other half WAN 2 will be used. If you have a bigger bandwidth on WAN 1, you might consider a 70/30 or even an 80/20 split, just experiment until you find your own sweet spot.

At this point, you are all set, you now have a router that is load balanced against 2 Internet connections. You might want to to change the IP address of your PC back to ‘dynamic’ then try to see if LB604 is already giving away IP addresses (broadcasting DHCP). Just to see if everything is working, close the browser window, then relaunch it, type http://192.168.0.1 again—this time around, it should ask you for the password which you have configured earlier in the process.

Advanced settings

Load balancing means that you can never tell which Internet connection the traffic will go through at any point in time, sometimes this causes problems when sending mails, specially if one of your ISPs does not allow smtp on their network, except if the smtp relay will go through their own smtp (mail) servers. You can set the smtp traffic to always take a specific Internet connection when sending mails, you will need to bind the smtp traffic to a specific WAN.

You can do this from the ‘tools’ menu then click ‘Misc’, tick the ‘enable’ smtp binding, then choose from the drop down box (smtp binding port) which WAN you would ‘always’ like to use when sending mails.

If you want all other protocols, like http, https, ftp etc to always go through a specific WAN, you can do that from the ‘advanced’ screen, then click ‘Host IP’.

Hostname – The hostname of the PC which you’d like to bind to a specific WAN

MAC address – the Physical address of the PC which you’d like to bind to a specific WAN, you can get the physical address of your network interface card by clicking Control Panel (if you’re on Vista or Windows 7), just search for ‘adapter settings’, then click ‘Network and sharing center’, then click “Change Adapter settings”, once you double click the network adapter, you should be able to see some of the details of that adapter.

Click ‘Details’, you can now see the physical address of the network adapter. You can do this quickly from the cmd line, just type

C:\> ipconfig /all

Next, tick the ‘enable’ box of ‘Binding WAN Port session’, you can leave it as loose binding, then choose from the drop down which WAN would you like to always use  for the PC (the one whose Physical address you’ve setup). Click ‘Apply’

Resetting the Internet IP address of the router

Lastly, from time to time, you might need to reset or renew the IP address of the router—you can do this as part of troubleshooting when the Internet connection is sluggish.

This can be done on the ‘status’ screen, just click the ‘Force Renew’ button of the WAN which you’d like to reset or renew.

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