this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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I guess my ISP uses some subpar hardware because the connection keeps dropping at peak hours. I want to implement a failover system without having to buy some expensive router which I would not be able to justify with my normal usage.

Wanted to know some other ways how people do it .

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[–] Steeven9@alien.top 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] uvish66@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Already did it once . No ISP is my area is 100% reliable.

[–] idl3mind@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

This.

There are two fiber to the home providers in central Mississippi: AT&T and Cspire. As far as I know, Cspire is a Mississippi only ISP.

Before I moved 2 years ago, the Cspire connection was rock-solid. It never went offline.

After we moved, I could wake up on any random day and Cspire would be down for half a day. I guess I can’t complain too much since their synchronous 1GB fiber service is $85/mo, but when you have a teenager that will worry you to death about the internet being offline… well you get the idea.

So I added ATT 1GB synchronous fiber for $80/mo. I like the Cspire Ethernet handoff better than using the ATT modem (even with IP passthru). The ATT service has been stable since adding it 18 months ago. My router (EdgeRouter 4) easily does load-balancing, so I’ve kept both services.

No more downtime, I have a dedicated UPS for the network gear (separate from servers) and I can keep internet up for 8+ hours after a power outage.

[–] Poncho_Via6six7@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Standard ISP and cradlepoint AER 3000 with Verizon and ATT back up

[–] dragnucs@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I simply fall back to using 4G from another provider than fiber channel.

[–] BoopJoop01@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I run dual 4G WAN anyway because of latency and bandwidth, failover was just a bonus.

I got like 2mbps on cable, and I'm pretty sure the line is now actually broken/severed (tree fell on it) and they just never bothered fixing it because nobody uses it anyway.

[–] TinoOG@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

2.5Gbps main uplink and 1Gbps failover uplink, pfsense, and a 5G wireless modem in case of emergency or nuclear fallout

[–] hiddenasian42@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

DSL main, cheap little LTE modem via USB as a fallback. Both are connected to my OPNsense as a gateway group. Failover happens after 5s of full packet loss (and a bunch of less aggressive failover conditions, latency etc.). That of course changes my public IPv4 address, so yes this drops existing connections. Not a big deal for most stuff, Netflix reconnects quickly enough that this isn't even noticeable. For the stuff where the connection can't drop like that, I run a VPN tunnel on each of the two uplinks to a small relay box with a static IP sitting in a datacenter. When DSL fails, the traffic is routed through the other VPN link but comes out of the relay box with the same public IP.

[–] bigDottee@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Do you have any tutorials that you followed for this type of configuration?

[–] siverpro@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait, one’s supposed to have a network failover solution?

[–] uvish66@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

not for hobby homelabs I guess , but more of a wfh setup.

[–] travelinzac@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

“Gonna take a 4 hour lunch, internets out” lol

[–] krissovo@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I have a Rutx12 router that has 2 cellular modems, if the WAN link fails it will route via 2 load balanced 4g connections. It works great in my hack rack and means my lab is completely mobile with no breaks in connectivity

[–] alias4007@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

This is the way

[–] murdaBot@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I've got a dual-wan UXG-Pro and am lucky enough to have two 1Gbps providers (fiber + cable), plus an employer who reimburses me for both. I have a small wired T-Mobile LTE MiFi device as backup, but never needed it. ($20 a month + usage over 2GB)

[–] JLee50@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

5gbps fiber and then a 5G business internet backup failover via UniFi UDM-Pro, all on UPS with a standby Generac. We can take a power and ISP outage simultaneously and have a second or so connectivity hiccup.

[–] Busy_Reporter4017@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Sounds very inexpensive for a home user.

[–] rickman1011@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Funny! I have an almost identical setup, 5G fiber, 5G Home internet, udm pro on UPS. Instead of standby I have a big lithium setup and a manual inverter generator to top it off if need be. It has been great to have.

[–] JLee50@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Nice! All else being equal I’d rather have a big lithium setup (would tie nicely with my solar) but the house came with a generator, so the free generator won lol

[–] _EuroTrash_@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Main fiber link with one ISP and cable modem with a different ISP. I'm lucky enough to live at an intersection where both options are available - and the two links are literally buried under two different roads.

[–] MrJacks0n@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I have a cheap hotspot that I use for fail over of a couple things like home automation and remote access. Not enough data to do a full fail over but keeping a couple things going is enough.

[–] Giannis_Dor@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

get a mikrotik they are good for the price and setup recursive routing so what I'm using right now is 2 wans or you could use 1 wan and 1 4g or plug a phone on the usb port and turn on usb tethering so basically recursive routing checks if a host is up on a line say isp 1 pings to see if 1.1.1.1 is up if not switch to isp 2 isp 1 is my own line and isp 2 is my apartment's shared internet connection that has unstable speeds but for failover, it's better than nothing

[–] taxigrandpa@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

try increasing your speed. we had an issue once like this, turns out one of our systems was flooding the connection and it would reset. Once we increased the speed the bottleneck went away and it quit happening

[–] uvish66@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I have a pretty minimal setup , Few smart devices , phones, computers and a desktop server. I don't think of any of those devices creating issues.

[–] auron_py@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I've got two ISP connections that go to a Juniper SRX300, this is totally unnecessary and overkill but I got the router for free from work (I actually have a few of them).

[–] SirLagz@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

pfSense virtual router connect to a FTTP NTD and a Huawei LTE 4G router

[–] CTRL1@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Your asking for redundancy. You plug in a second wan connection and configure a failover.

[–] identicalBadger@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I don’t need failover at home. If I lose internet for a day, I’ll tether with my phone, go to a coffee shop or the office. Nothing in my homelab will die for lack of internet either

[–] kookykoalajon@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I have T-Mobiles Internet @Home, and CTL fiber both routed into my OpenWrt router, configured to do fail over

My primary is 200/200 fiber, and uses 5G as failover.

I host my VPN on a small vps, with nginx proxy manager, it routes my service’s back to my router using wireguard

My openwrt router is a Pi 4 operating as a “router on a stick” currently, I use an Aruba 2920 switch to achieve this but can also be done with usb Ethernet adapters.

I hear MicoTik has some good cheap hardware and is extremely powerful router capable of the same things at reasonable price, but my openwrt has worked for me for many years.

[–] pissy_corn_flakes@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I run two pfsense routers and use CARP. 1gbps/50 cable modem with 5 static ips available on both pfsenses, and a 1 gbps symmetrical FTTH with 1 static ip also available on both pfsenses (but uses CARP to know which is “live” - it uses pppoe, which makes this possible with 1 ip).

My current single point of failure is my single main switch. Works very well though. I’ve had 100% uptime for over a year!

[–] -SPOF@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

A Raspberry Pi with two network interfaces (one can be a USB-to-Ethernet or USB-to-WiFi adapter) can be set up as a failover router. Just write scripts to check the internet connectivity regularly and switch between connections as needed.

[–] idl3mind@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

My EdgeRouter 4 does a good job of load-balancing two internet connections. Just a couple of PBR lines in the config and it was working.

[–] lndependentRabbit@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

OPNsense running on a 4 port Protectli. I use 2 ports for WAN connections with load balancing. I have it set to failover to using just one if there is packet loss or high latency on the other.

I’ve wanted one for a long time but don’t have time to deploy it.

So no fall over for mine. 💀

[–] tauntingbob@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I have gigabit cable and fail-over to VDSL2.

I use a UDM-Pro with dual WAN configured. I previously used PfSense with load balancing and feel it did it better than the UDM-Pro, but there are other benefits to the UniFi ecosystem.

[–] AlexisColoun@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

A pile of shame, consisting of all the books I bought and haven't read yet.

[–] Busy_Reporter4017@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Cellular router with failover.

[–] Dus1988@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Main ISP is fiber, house is part of HOA that has cable internet included, so that is my failover.

Main is 2gbps symmetrical

Failover is 300 down, 10 up

[–] NoSoulsINC@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

The only time my network is down is when the power is out

[–] duckwebs@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Edgerouter 4 with 1 Gb symmetric fiber primary and cable 500/20 backup. Network is setup so most media devices that are down-only come through the backup so I have regular verification that it's functioning. Essentially two ports in the house supply separate networks, each with a dedicated outside line, but set up to fail over to the other outside line.

I thought they had completely dropped the Edgerouter line, but I just popped over and it looks like they're actually in stock and reasonably priced. If I had to replace the ER4, I'd probably go to an ER12, which as far as I can tell is an ER4 with a built in switch (the ER4 doesn't act as a switch between ports - each port has its own address space).

[–] edthesmokebeard@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Go outside and do yardwork. Play with the dog. Read a book. Wait for the ISP to fix their shit.

[–] Missing_Space_Cadet@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

100% up time obviously

[–] CombJelliesAreCool@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

My router is x86 linux, so I can just usb tether to my phone like a frugal king.

One of those travel routers sharing the connection from my neighbors Xfinity Hotspot ($20/mnth) as my second uplink to my main fiber

[–] 1911ACP@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

A $30 GL.iNET Opal router tethered to my cell phone. Plugged a cable from a LAN port of the Opal to the WAN or WAN2 of my pfSense router.

If the Opal is plugged in WAN2 all the time you could have pfSense do automatic failover that is seamless.

[–] Recent_Penalty7063@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Fail over? Cry and smoke some weed until it comes back on.

[–] dro159@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

I use an cheap EdgeRouterX to detect failover events then route all traffic out secondary WAN (Teltonika 4G) and I have a nice failover script where I get notified via pushover of the events.

[–] planetwords@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Mikrotik do inexpensive routers and their RouterOS is wonderful.

It can even do connection-based load balancing over two connections, although I don't have the mastery to set this up yet.

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