Hi,

I bought the 2862ln in order to load balance between Three on LTE and BT on VSDL. I have been having some intermittent problems with Three and decided to take the load balancing off and route specific machines to LTE and everything else to BT. The way I have achieved this is through Load-Balance/Route Policy and left the load balancing checked on each WAN general set-up. I have also set the DNS on the LAN to use 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 for DHCP, as when the load balancing was on it would not resolve and I put this down to the ISPs DNS not working on each others. Setting manually appeared to do the trick.

Anyway, I am really seeking for some advice on whether this is the best way to achieve this, as I am still getting some odd issues whereby some sites won't load but do after a few refreshes. I was wondering whether this is still related to DNS issues and/or routing, is it still trying to do something with load balancing across the two connections even though I have put the route policies in place?

Thanks,

Matt

I'm a bit puzzled by you saying that you have taken load balancing off but have left it checked on both WANs. What happens if you uncheck it and rely on your policies?

Yes, apologies that is a little ambiguous. What I meant was it has been my intent to stop the load balancing and force some machines to go through VSDL, others through LTE. I had achieved this through leaving the load balancing option on and using the routing for load balancing to force devices through one or the other.

If I uncheck the load balancing option the policies don't seem to apply. I assume this is due to the Load-Balancing/Route Policy is dependent on load balancing being on?

OK, so if I disable load balancing (via the checkbox) on the LTE and VSDL connections and removed the forcing of DNS it didn't initially work, as it seems the machines routed to LTE automatically pick up the VSDL DNS servers. Is that how it should work, simply pull the DNS from the WAN1 (VSDL)? Why would it not obtain from the LTE line?

If I set the DNS manually to something public e.g. 1.1.1.1, directly on those machines that should be redirecting to LTE then they then work.

Again, feels like I am possibly not setting this up in the most effective way?

I don't have an LTE router but I have a 2926 with a vdsl modem on WAN1 and a wifi 4G router connected as WAN2. I'm afraid I don't know about the DNS being pulled from the LTE line as I use the "force router to use DNS in LAN1" setting (with 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1) and when WAN1 fails over to WAN2 and back again everything seems to work fine. There is a brief hiatus as WAN2 takes over but it doesn't seem to affect eg streaming Netflix, presumably because it's buffered.

Interestingly when I got up this morning my devices had no internet connection - I checked the router and both vdsl and wifi WANs were up, but there was no internet - and, presumably because I was using ARP detect on the vdsl line it had not failed over because the line was still up. I've changed that to ping detect now which I hope will resolve that issue.
A quick check on Zen status indicated that BT were having a few problems - vdsl internet came back on at around 9am.

I had originally configured the router the same, forcing to use DNS in LAN1. However, there was definitely some weirdness going on with the clients browsing as described.

It may be early days still but having the router set-up the way I have it now seems to be stable and the clients going through LTE are not having any problems right now

• WAN1 - VSDL config for BT Fibre
  

• Active Node - Always On

• Load Balancing - Unchecked

• LTE - Config for Three SIM
  

• Active Node - Always On

• Load Balancing - Unchecked

• LAN1 - General
  

• Force router to use "DNS server IP address" settings specified in - disabled

• LAN1 - Details
  

• DHCP Server - enabled

• DNS Servers - empty

• Routing --> Load Balance Routing
  

• Entries for each device to use LTE

• Catch all for everything else to use VSDL

• Clients
  

• Manually override DNS settings to 1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8 - note in Windows 10 this had to be applied in two places to not be overridden

Needless to say, this doesn't provide load balancing but I'd rather stability right now. Still feels like there might be a better way to achieve this though.

Thanks,

Matt