Kosmik
Honorary Master
Ok so quite a few folks have asked about my home setup with time based routing, so here's a brief guide. I may update as I go so please bear with me.
The Need:
Cost is obviously a factor for folks these days and I wanted to see how best I can leverage my bang for buck. ADSL became a pain with the reduction in copper and local exchange limitations , not to mention Telkom's spotty infrastructure support, Fibre is unavailable at this time and I went the LTE route originally with Telkom 20+20 and the after hours 500Gb. We could cope with this as we did mainly browsing and I played online. Traffic was low except in the case of game downloads which are bigger and bigger every year ( Doom was a whopping 60+ gigs ). Then Telkom decided to can their 500Gb availability and this set the old brain churning. And also along came Rain with the offer of uncapped days and a great off peak uncapped service. Fibre was coming but I was looking at a good couple of months, not to mention a decent 20mbps connection was around R800pm anyway which I really wasn't going to spend.
The Kit:
I already had a B315 with my Telkom contract ( 1 year left to go! ) and I asked a few mates who recently got fibre if they could spare their old routers. One mate obliged, even lent me a huge antennae which I haven't setup yet. So now I had two routers but how to control traffic between them. I looked into devices like a microtek router but it just seemed overkill. I could do software routing by a server I have on my lan but that would require all traffic going to the box and it doing the routing plus my other requirements. I wanted something relatively simple to manage and ideally a nice dedicated separate hardware solution. In steps the TP-LINK R470t+ load balancing router. This little package, and I do mean small, could control multiple connections for me from load balancing, fail over and even bonding as well as qos and traffic optimization. It was also relatively cheap, paid about R650 for it from www.buyanthing.co.za ( free punt chaps, had good service ).
Note: I'm not including a separate switch or dedicated AP but ideally those would be in here too for a clean solution on the lan side and full propagation via wifi and 2.4/5Ghz bands.
The Design:
So basic topology is each router would configured stock standard as per their sim and the load balancer would send traffic, depending on time of day. I stuck to basic network ranges and planned as below:
LAN - 192.168.1.0 range with Load Balancer configured as 192.168.1.1 It also distributed DHCP on the same range between 100-200.
WAN1 Lan - 192.168.2.0 range with the router being 192.168.2.1
WAN2 Lan - 192.168.3.0 range with the router being 192.168.3.1
From the research I did, due to these being LTE the routers were slightly limited, it was required to configure a DMZ on each to allow traffic to the Load Balancer which would impersonate a endpoint on each WAN LAN. I chose the .5 address for my DMZ's and configured as 192.168.2.5 and 192.168.3.5 The loadbalancer would have time groups configured and route the traffic to the respective wans based on time of day.
The Guide
Configure Router 1 - Capped
So here is the normal LTE router home screen. If you haven't by now, please ensure your password has been changed from default and you secured the router. First we need to setup the LAN. Strangely on these routers, you find the static lan address and wifi and DHCP
I'm utilizing the wifi direct on the devices so left the dhcp running. Will explain later, now the DMZ.
Lastly I read that one should disable the firewall to enable these routers to enter a light "bridge" mode as they don't support full bridging but I actually found that I tried both options, one on each router and it had no effect so up to you. I rely on the LoadBalancers firewall which seems more powerful to handle threats. Keep in mind, anything on the LAN of the individual AP's wifi, will be DIRECTLY exposed, hence why I would rather have a dedicated AP lan side but other reasons too.
Now repeat the process with the second Router.
Like I said, on one of the router I disabled the firewall but both seem to run fine.
Next post, the magic happens.
The Need:
Cost is obviously a factor for folks these days and I wanted to see how best I can leverage my bang for buck. ADSL became a pain with the reduction in copper and local exchange limitations , not to mention Telkom's spotty infrastructure support, Fibre is unavailable at this time and I went the LTE route originally with Telkom 20+20 and the after hours 500Gb. We could cope with this as we did mainly browsing and I played online. Traffic was low except in the case of game downloads which are bigger and bigger every year ( Doom was a whopping 60+ gigs ). Then Telkom decided to can their 500Gb availability and this set the old brain churning. And also along came Rain with the offer of uncapped days and a great off peak uncapped service. Fibre was coming but I was looking at a good couple of months, not to mention a decent 20mbps connection was around R800pm anyway which I really wasn't going to spend.
The Kit:
I already had a B315 with my Telkom contract ( 1 year left to go! ) and I asked a few mates who recently got fibre if they could spare their old routers. One mate obliged, even lent me a huge antennae which I haven't setup yet. So now I had two routers but how to control traffic between them. I looked into devices like a microtek router but it just seemed overkill. I could do software routing by a server I have on my lan but that would require all traffic going to the box and it doing the routing plus my other requirements. I wanted something relatively simple to manage and ideally a nice dedicated separate hardware solution. In steps the TP-LINK R470t+ load balancing router. This little package, and I do mean small, could control multiple connections for me from load balancing, fail over and even bonding as well as qos and traffic optimization. It was also relatively cheap, paid about R650 for it from www.buyanthing.co.za ( free punt chaps, had good service ).
Note: I'm not including a separate switch or dedicated AP but ideally those would be in here too for a clean solution on the lan side and full propagation via wifi and 2.4/5Ghz bands.
The Design:
So basic topology is each router would configured stock standard as per their sim and the load balancer would send traffic, depending on time of day. I stuck to basic network ranges and planned as below:
LAN - 192.168.1.0 range with Load Balancer configured as 192.168.1.1 It also distributed DHCP on the same range between 100-200.
WAN1 Lan - 192.168.2.0 range with the router being 192.168.2.1
WAN2 Lan - 192.168.3.0 range with the router being 192.168.3.1
From the research I did, due to these being LTE the routers were slightly limited, it was required to configure a DMZ on each to allow traffic to the Load Balancer which would impersonate a endpoint on each WAN LAN. I chose the .5 address for my DMZ's and configured as 192.168.2.5 and 192.168.3.5 The loadbalancer would have time groups configured and route the traffic to the respective wans based on time of day.
The Guide
Configure Router 1 - Capped
So here is the normal LTE router home screen. If you haven't by now, please ensure your password has been changed from default and you secured the router. First we need to setup the LAN. Strangely on these routers, you find the static lan address and wifi and DHCP
I'm utilizing the wifi direct on the devices so left the dhcp running. Will explain later, now the DMZ.
Lastly I read that one should disable the firewall to enable these routers to enter a light "bridge" mode as they don't support full bridging but I actually found that I tried both options, one on each router and it had no effect so up to you. I rely on the LoadBalancers firewall which seems more powerful to handle threats. Keep in mind, anything on the LAN of the individual AP's wifi, will be DIRECTLY exposed, hence why I would rather have a dedicated AP lan side but other reasons too.
Now repeat the process with the second Router.
Like I said, on one of the router I disabled the firewall but both seem to run fine.
Next post, the magic happens.
Last edited:
