@cfusco , I also have a question about “smart things”.
First of all, I fully agree with what you have stated in the previous posts.
Needing (out of passion) to create load balancing for myself (if one adsl or fiber line, goes down on me, another one set as failover is activated),
I bought a TPLINK er605 router for about 100€, which I attached “cascaded” to IPFire’s RED, automatically creating double NAT, double firewall and double port forward.
Honestly, this smart router is not giving me much satisfaction: once a month I have to reboot it, because it hiccups.
How do you see this? I know that IPFire does not currently support load balancing which I am interested in.
@casabenedetti I am not competent enough to give an informed opinion. However there are several people here that know network hardware well. I hope they will give you their point of view.
I thank you very much for the shift. I was sure I posted in the wrong topic. I realized it later.
Yes, I have updated. My hardware version though is 1.
So the latest firmware I see for my model is 2022-06-15
In fact, the hardware V2 even has a USB port. My hardware is the old model. I read that you damage the router by loading firmware from another hardware version. And that seems logical to me.
I am convinced, however, that big solutions are not there, other than buying either a better router or waiting for IPFire version 3. It seems to me that it will integrate such a system.
Also consider that I have been behind these upgrades. But after 30 days of continuous ER605 operation, failover no longer works if the main line goes down. Only solution: Reboot the ER605 once a month. For me it is a BUG that this firmware carries with it. Maybe for now I will use an electronic system that will reboot it for me. Or I will replace ER605 with unstable IPFire 3: a good reason to test it.
But I wonder you do have TWO ISP connections and have so many IOT devices you need to load balance them? Is IPFire able to handle two ISP providers on RED at all?
With multi-wan, IPFire cannot do load balancing by itself, but it can keep the line stable with a fail over automatic switch to the second provider if both lines are PPoE. I also believe that you can have two separate IPFire, one for each provider and using keepalived implementation of the Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol you can create only one gateway for your clients.
No idea about the details. My sources are the two documents I linked above.
Yes, let’s say it is not vital for me to use two ISP.
Having surveillance cameras, it might come in handy to activate the second ISP (SIM modem) if the first ISP (landline) goes down.
But the first ISP is stable. I could also eliminate it ER605.
The in any case, roughly it works. I can’t evaluate the gigabit surfing speed well. I have 90 mega downloads on the first ISP and 60 mega downloads on the second ISP. With these values no attenuation.
There is only this “monthly restart” problem, which would not be serious.
But eventually I will have to check the Tp-Link forums. It is not an IPFire problem. Of that I am certain.
The solution suggested by @cfusco
I did not know. I will definitely take it into account.
