Hey folks,

I've a beginner question here: What is the normal way to achieve a setup where you do have around 300 to 400 clients but still want to use DHCP? My goal is to bring wifi/internet connection to a conference. So interconnection between those people is not the most important part of this network setup. Way more important is that all people can connect to the internet. We got a Vigor 3900 and will run 4 VDSL lines into that. So I want to have some sort of round robin load balancing for all connected clients over those 4 WAN ports without worrying much about anything else ;)

Can anyone give me some hints on how to get there?

Thank you so much!

Thorben

Checkout Classless subnetting (CIDR). By changing your subnet suffix you can increase the number of available addresses.

For example 192.168.0.0 usually has a suffix of /24. Which is also described as a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0 (if you write that mask out in binary the first 24 bits are all 1) It has 256 subnets and 255 -2 usable addresses.
CIDR address range 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.255

Classless subnetting ditches Class A, B and C subnets and gives us more granularity and control

192.168.0.0 with a suffix of /20 has a subnet mask of 255.255.240.0 (first 20 bits are all 1) It has 4096 subnets and 4096-2 addresses.
CIDR address range 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.15.255

192.168.0.0 with a suffix of /30 has a subnet mask of 255.255.255.252 (first 30 bits are all 1) It has 2 subnets and 2 addresses
CIDR address range 192.168.0.0 - 192.168.0.3

Note the beginning and ending addresses in a range have special uses and cannot be used for hosts (devices)

See this http://www.subnet-calculator.com/cidr.php

Thanks a lot! I will give that a try asap.

Do you have any suggestion for the load balancing over the 4 WANs? Is it wise to go by IP ranges (first 50 IPs wan0, next 50...)?

Cheers,

Thorben

Have a look at Pfsense. This can use wide subnets. We have some pub wifi setups using subnets 192.168.8.1 on a subnet of 255.255.248.0, which gives you 192.168.8.1 - 192.168.15.254. Plenty!

Pfsense runs on a PC on it's own unix OS, installed on a bootable HDD or USB drive. You can fit several network cards to the PC, using them as WANS and LANS - Probably for you just one lan, and several wans connected to Draytek 120 modems (or two NICS connected to two dual wan draytek routers).

So my plan is do get all this done with a Vigor 3900, 4 Vigor 2750 modems and some sort of router that then connects to 6 Unifi wifi APs. Does that sound sane? I hoped to be able to live without pfsense or any custom hardware.

walski wrote: So my plan is do get all this done with a Vigor 3900, 4 Vigor 2750 modems and some sort of router that then connects to 6 Unifi wifi APs. Does that sound sane? I hoped to be able to live without pfsense or any custom hardware.

To connect the 6 UniFi APs, you would be better off with a switch than a router. Draytek has some switches -

Power Over Ethernet Vigor P1080 8 x 10/100 BaseT UTP ports
Power Over Ethernet Vigor P2261 24 x 10/100/1000 BaseT UTP ports

The G2140 has 24 ports without PoE

These switches have quite a good feature set, including the ability to set up isolated PVLANs - so its easy to isolate guests from the rest of the network AND FROM EACH OTHER (this is becoming a privacy issue).

If you don't need VDSL, you could use the Vigor 120 ADSL modem in place of the 2750 modems

R+C