WAN Balancer does not work for two PPPOE VSDL connections

[emulated]

Hi,
I have two PPPOE VSDL bonds, both are online and work fine on their own, but I cannot convince WAN Balancer to do its job no matter what I configure.
I have 50/50 allocation set in WAN Balancer:

Screenshot 2021-01-05 at 16.10.38.png


However, all traffic is only routed via first VSDL connection. Always, no exceptions.
WAN Failover sees both interfaces online, all tests are successful:

Screenshot 2021-01-05 at 16.16.31.png


This is the configuration of network interfaces:

Screenshot 2021-01-05 at 16.18.09.png


I had a call with the ISP tech support and the guy said all VDSL connections are ending up on the same network device, so perhaps Untangle sees the gateway as being the same for both interfaces. But why does that matter?
I would assume, WAN Balancer is using interface names as the identifier, eg. ppp0 and ppp1.
Honestly, I can't get my head around it. Tried enabling/disabling QoS, no effect.

Anyone with a suggestion please?

[jcoffin]

Two WANs from the same ISP will not balance correctly will WAN Balancer. The central gateway is the same.

[emulated]

Is there no way around it? Why does it matter if it's from the same ISP?

[donhwyo]

I admit I don't know much about this. Could you make an alias to have a different ip?

[sky-knight]

You cannot have a router connected twice to the same network, that's TCP/IP 101. Just like you cannot reuse addresses on multiple devices, you cannot connect a router which by definition connects DIFFERENT networks to each other, connected to the same network twice.

WAN Balancer cannot change these rules. The device you need is a WAN Aggregator, which sadly WAN Balancer isn't.

https://www.untangle.com/shop/wan-balancer/

Combine multiple Internet Service Provider (ISP) connections into a single “virtual connection” with the cumulative performance of all of these connections.

That sentence is a bit confusing, but it means what it says on the tin. You need unique ISPs for each connection for it to work. I wish we had a better way to say that... But as much as I know about that limitation, I don't know how to boil it down to a single sentence for a webpage either.

But yeah, Untangle breaks up sessions on the egress by choosing among the gateways available. When WANs have the same gateway, there simply is nothing to choose, so the first gateway gets all the sessions.

I do wonder if WAN Balancer could be enhanced to control the egress via source route, and thereby choose based on the WAN interface itself... but it cannot do this currently, and I'm not terribly well qualified to even figure out how to make that work either.

[donhwyo]

Quote "I do wonder if WAN Balancer could be enhanced to control the egress via source route, and thereby choose based on the WAN interface itself... but it cannot do this currently, and I'm not terribly well qualified to even figure out how to make that work either. "

Seems like something they could charge more for.

[emulated]

Thanks guys for valuable answers, I got the point.
I fully understand the difference between balancing and aggregation, but I still believe it should be possible to "balance" the connections between two WAN's regardless of the so called "gateway" which in fact is not a gateway in PPPoE/VSDL world.
Something like simple round-robin that will route connections to different IP's/ports or from different devices via the other WAN connection.
Sort of an enhancement of existing WAN Balancer, but with simpler logic behind it.
Is this something Untangle is considering or planning?

[bluechris]

Is this a vm untangle install? If yes, you can fire up a 2nd untangle only to pppoe one of the 2 lines. Then that 2nd free licence untangle will serve the main untangle as wan connection.
You will end up in the main untangle with 2 wan connections with different gateway's.
1 wan pppoe to the provider
2nd wan to 2nd untangle that connects to 2nd pppoe to provider.

Everything in wan balancer will work fine after. Keep in mind to dmz in 2nd untangle everything to the 1st untangle.

I have done the above 2 times and work beautifully. You can add any router to do the same instead of 2nd untangle instsllation if your main untangle is hardware.

[sky-knight]

That is true, if you have another router you can put the PPPoE on that device and have it doing NAT.

Then on the Untangle side you setup a WAN link with NAT disabled.

Now Untangle sees two gateways, and WAN Balancer works.

[donhwyo]

Are the modems doing the pppoe? If so, can't you just change the internal ip on one of them?