Afternoon All,

I am after some help. One of my customers wants to load balance their to internet line (differnt ISP's) between a draytek router and a cisco one.

Is there any basic steps to perform to get this working as I have never done this before?

Any help would be appreciated

Thanks

Ray

Ray,

The nearest thing that I have done is to connect two routers on different internet links to one each of the two WAN ports of a Draytek Vigor 2950 and then used the 2950 to do the load balancing. Have either of the routers in question got 2 WAN ports (or the option of adding one)?

I guess a crude way to do it would be to connect both routers to the LAN and give some devices on the LAN the IP address of one router as their default gateway and the other ones the IP address of the other router as their default gateway. I think that would work so long as you made sure only one of them was providing things like DHCP and they weren't messing with each others routing table, but that wouldn't do anything fancy if one of the lines was too busy or had failed.

You could also think about a PC or server with three LAN cards in, one connected to each router and the other to the LAN, and use software to do the load balancing. I'm guessing this feature would be there in Linux, or one of the many software firewalls.

Kevin

Ray,

I've just found out you can do load balancing using my old favourite dd-wrt . You would run this on a Linksys WRT54G router (or any other router supported by dd-wrt) and use that to do the load balancing.

Kevin

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the replys much appricated!! The draytek has a WAN1 and WAN2 port on it. Do you then think I could connect the cisco router into the Drayteck WAN2 port and then get the Draytek to do the load balancing??

Thanks again

Ray

Ray,

I can't promise it will work, but that would seem like a sensible approach. Check the features of the model of Draytek and if it claims to do load balancing between the two WAN ports. It might also benefit from a firmware upgrade, I know later firmware does add more bandwidth controls.

Kevin

rayg1979 wrote: Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the replys much appricated!! The draytek has a WAN1 and WAN2 port on it. Do you then think I could connect the cisco router into the Drayteck WAN2 port and then get the Draytek to do the load balancing??

Thanks again

Ray

Hi Kevin,
I have just tried the very same thing as you and so far I have been unable to get WAN 2 port working correctly. Its configured on the Draytek 2820Vn fine, and has the correct IP address and subnet mask/default gateway, but it cannot ping the second router through the Draytek, even though it's on the same IP subnet??

Which suggests to me that even though enabled, the Draytek is not routing the packet correctly.

So I am stumped. Maybe the WAN 2 port only works if you have an ethernet based PPOE service connected? I don't know, but certainly the documentation suggests that it should work with any ethernet connection, as long as there is a route to the internet on the other router?

Any advice anyone has here would be greatly appreciated.

Yakuzah.....