Main ISP with failover backup ISP

[bluesky]

Hi, we recently upgraded from two satellite ISPs to a WiMAX ISP.

Long story short...... before we load balanced the two ISPs at 50/50, and used both all the time. Now, we would like to use only the 1 main ISP, with the second ISP for backup only. Both still use dynamic, with all information being stored in the modems.

I looked in the Wan Failover and Balancers, and in Interfaces, but I don't see any option to use a specific WAN interface in failover/backup mode only..... i only see where we can assign weights to each WAN.

So how do we accomplish this? Do we set the "backup" ISP WAN with a weight of "0", and then it would only be usable in the event of a failure on the main ISP WAN? The backup ISP is much inferior to the main one, so we would only want it for emergency failover.

[johnsonx42]

If now you only want to use the second WAN for backup, I'd think you would just turn off WAN Balancer. The "External" interface is the default for WAN Failover, so you'd want to make that one your main ISP.

[bluesky]

ok, that sounds easy enough.

Out of curiosity, would there be any merit in having the backup WAN with the "0" weight idea, so I could monitor using both WAN Failover and Balancer for current packets? And then the backup WAN would kick in during an External failover?

Or best to just turn Balancer off completely?

Thanks.

[johnsonx42]

I have to admit I've not used WAN Balancer, as my only client with dual WANs is in the same situation as you - their second WAN is so inferior to the primary that there's just nothing to balance. Ironically, the second WAN costs more too!

However I can't think of any reason why I'd use WAN Balancer in that scenario. It doesn't have any logs, so you can't monitor anything with it. In fact it doesn't even know if a WAN connection goes down without help from WAN Failover, hence why Balancer essentially requires Failover, and includes it.

[bluesky]

I did some swapping today, and moved our primary ISP onto External, and backup ISP onto one of the eth interfaces.

I can see now the simplest way (in this scenario of main and backup) is to just turn off Balancer. Unfortunately our new WiMAX ISP is offline for adjustments right now, so when it comes back online it will be the first test for the failover.