How to set up a fall-back internet connection when the primary one fails?

[RavenLunatic]

My VM broadband went down last week, and it got me thinking about setting up a backup so all my IOT devices and computers could still operate. My thoughts were to make my phone a mobile hotspot setting the SSID and Password the same as my routers WIFI security settings. Would my computers and IOT automatically jump on to the phones Internet connection if the routers one was unable to connect to the Internet? I am thinking it would act like a bridge connection, but I don’t know enough about networking to the sure. What issues would this cause?

 

[RavenLunatic]

So I would have to disable WIFI on my router if my VM connection fails then it would work?

 

[RavenLunatic]

Thanks everyone for your input. My aim is to be just able to browse the web, get e-mails, and for Alexa to control the lighting in my flat. I have looked for a router with a SIM card slot but none of them are capable of 2.5Gb ethernet which I will need. I did find ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX6000 which claims to have a tethering option for 4G and 5G in the specs which when I think about it is exactly what I am trying to do. There is no mention of a tethering function in the manual.

 

[RavenLunatic]

I would say I the VM connection usually dies two or three times a year lasting from a day to a month. Last year my VM connection had a serious packet loss problem which took a month to fix which meant no online gaming was possible. I didn’t qualify for automatic compensation as it was not 100% packet loss. I did find out that the tethering function of the ASUS ROG Rapture GT-AX6000 requires a 4G or 5G phone to be plugged into the USB port. I was hopping it would do it wirelessly so I could use my phone at the same time.

For an extra £15 a month I can get unlimited data plan from o2 for my phone and use that as my fall-back. Or I can pay £30 a month for a second internet connection which would probably outperform my mobile phone hotspot by quite a lot.

 

[RavenLunatic]

I hadn’t considered building my own router and WIFI Access point. One of those mini pc’s serve the home review would be quite interesting to play around with. I fear it would be a rabbit hole and I would end up spending £££ on something way overpowered for what I need. I agree that I need a router with failover to do this properly. I’m now not sure my phone will be able to handle 19 WIFI connections at the same time all be it most are smart plugs or lights.

 

[RavenLunatic]

I am stuck with VM for another 12 months and I have only recently been given the green light for Openreach FTTP. I am kind of stuck in the Alexa ecosystem, if it cannot call home every time you give it a command nothing works. There must be 4 or 5 different apps on my phone to control all the IOT stuff and it is so much easier just to let Alexa deal with it.

 

[RavenLunatic]

LOL I know first world problems

Over time, you become accustomed to its convenience, much like adjusting during an electricity blackout.

 

[RavenLunatic]

If I were to get a N100 NUC type box, should I look for one with SFP ports for future proofing? How much RAM and storage should I be looking for? The GW-R86S-U3 seems to have it all but its expensive. Alternatively, I could build a low power full ATX PC for it and have the flexibility to add in 10G network cards when I need it assuming I could find a motherboard with lots of PCIe slots. I have an old X299 Rampage VI Extreme motherboard I’m not using would that be overkill? It doesn’t support integrated graphics which will be a problem but plenty of second hand CPU's are available.

 

[RavenLunatic]

Can anyone confirm if the Openreach/ BT FTTP hub has a modem mode like VM do? I do not know what the BT FTTP router is called for fibre connections.

Two of my computers are capable of 10G like my TrueNAS Scale server, but I rarely use it as it costs too much to run for anything other than weekly backups. I can live without 10G networking as I am yet to find a reliable passively cooled 10G Switch, so everything runs at 2.5G for the moment.

I cannot seem to find any N100 NUC’s that have WIFI and at least 2 2.5G LAN/WAN plus a couple of 1G connections. I could get a used Dell Optiplex 5040 SFF Intel Core i5-6500 16GB 500GB for less than £80 then fit it with a 4x 2.5G NIC and a WIFI NIC. How would that compare to a N100? Will it use substantially more power?

 

[RavenLunatic]

Its done. I have gone the disposable HW route. Ordered a refurbished dell OptiPlex 5040, a half hight 4 port NIC, and a WIFI 6E NIC. If the CPU is not fast enough, then I will drop in a second hand i7 7700. Once I have OPNsense working I will look at getting an low cost Openreach FTTP line installed and have it as a fail over for my VM line.

 

[RavenLunatic]

After four days of diving into OpenWrt and OpnSense, I’ve come to the conclusion that neither of them is well-suited to serve as both a WiFi access point and a router. The lackluster wireless support in OpenWrt caught me off guard. In hindsight, I should have thoroughly researched the wireless capabilities before making my purchase. I opted for an Intel WiFi 6E ax210 PCIe card, assuming that Intel chipset support would be seamless. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support Access Point mode within OpenWrt. The consensus on the forums I’ve visited is clear: go for a standalone AP, especially when dealing with OPNSense. This does however free up a PCIex4 slot in the Dell for more Ethernet ports when its needed.

 

[RavenLunatic]

I have learned that when you put the VM router into modem mode you must power off the router and restart other wise you will not get an IP address. That took me 3 hours to work out after I exhausted every configuration in opnSense to get a WAN IP.

Spent most of the rest of Saturday trying to get opnSense to allow my network to reach the internet but everything I tried failed. My networked computers were getting local IP addresses, but I could not ping outside my network, The only thing I could access was the opnSense GUI which was able to retrieve updates from the internet. I think it was the firewall blocking all the DNS and IP traffic, but I am not educated enough to know what to do to resolve this.

Next, I turned to OpenWRT and that flat out refused the connection to let any of my computers from accessing the GUI, so I could not set anything up. So that went in the bin as well.

So, running out of options I thought I would try pfSense. I downloaded the ISO onto Ventoy and tried to install, but it failed with an installation error message ¾ of the way in. The ISO must have been corrupted. I did get an error message in windows when I tried to decompress the file with the built-in Windows extractor, but 7z extracted the file with no errors after a second try.

Last option was the pfSense USB installer image. I burned it onto a USB drive with Win32DiscImage and img file was written with no errors. Booted from the USB drive and pfSense installed successfully. I had to manually set up the WAN and LAN connections as pfSense did not pick them up automatically. To my surprise everything is now working!

I did not think it was going to be this hard to set up, but I am glad I did. I hope setting up the fail over connection configuration will go a bit smother.

 

[RavenLunatic]

Didn’t like pfSense so I tried OPNsense again and it worked this time. I must have messed up the configuration on my numerous attempts, possibly putting the DHCP on the wrong interface, or some other setting that I did not understand. It was made more difficult that my display didn’t show the command line on screen, so I had to guess what options to select based on the output of previous attempts. I have now learned a new FreeBSD command CLEAR which fixed the problem this time. Its funny that I am learning about firewalls now when all I wanted to do was turn my phone into a hotspot.