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

[Avalon]

I considered doing this after a recent loss of service with another provider that lasted 38hrs. After the initial annoyance, I realised that it’s probably not worth the expense for a once in decade event.

Depending on the router, you’re looking at anything between £15 for a dongle to £35 up to a few hundred for a decent 4/5G modem that’s unlocked and supports bridge mode and a reasonable number of channels, then a few quid on a SIM each month, and while you can get some amazing introductory rates, they do go up, so it’s getting on for a ton a year for not using it in Y2 and potentially more than that in Y1 because of the hardware (less if dongle, more if decent router).

I looked at it in simple terms: If that’s the difference between being able to work and not work or work from home rather than have to commute and it happens regularly, then that to me would easily be worth the cost. If it’s £100+ a year, happens once every few years and it’s just so I don’t have to flip a light switch or open a local app, then I think I can probably manage for a few hours. Obviously each persons priorities and situation are different.

 

[Disco_P]

"I can't turn off the lights if my internet is down"

The future is dumb.

 

[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.

 

[Avalon]

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.

You'll struggle - it's woefully under specified in terms of PCIe lanes to accommodate a 10Gb SFP+ port, let alone the two you would want, you need a better CPU with more PCIe lanes and that will bump the price significantly, which makes the older desktop route the more logical as it's cheap to buy, cheap to run and cheap to upgrade as required with the worst case power difference being anything from 6-10w which back when power prices were insane was £18-30/yr extra. You can't upgrade a N100, it could break even if you keep it running long enough though.

Spec depends on what you intend to run, OWRT is stupidly light, 1-2GB is absolutely fine, 4GB+ is probably more suited to *sense, more if you intend to load it up with heavy stuff.

 

[BigT]

I think you need to get in the headspace of rolling your own appliance as a disposable thing. Without support or warranty, as @Avalon says, you've no idea how long it'll last. And I'd cut my budget accordingly to that mindset. Do you need SFP 10G now? So why future proof. By the time you do need it a 16th gen Intel ex-corporate might be available for buttons. And if it doesn't last that long then you're not annoyed that you dropped a few hundred on something that blew up, just replace with something else equally disposable. The most valuable thing to me about my appliance is actually not the hardware, but the backups I have of the config, because if I had to reinvest all the time again in fine tuning the rules etc. I'd be so depressed!

 

[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?

 

[Caged]

The ONT is the "modem" in this scenario, plug into that and you get a WAN IP (after you dial the PPPoE connection).

 

[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.

 

[mejinks]

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.

Well done. I was thinkning along these lines but with a 3g dongle, but 4g here is woeful.

 

[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.

 

[Firegod]

This popped up the other day, I thought the timing was quite apt, with people discussing WAN failover etc.

Asus ExpertWiFi EBG15 Review: An Cool Little Router | Dong Knows Tech

The Asus ExpertWiFi EBG15 is a tiny router that can provide so much: VPN, VLAN, etc., and a robust mesh system when coupled with supported APs. Check it out!

dongknows.com

 

[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.