 Hi guys, welcome back to my YouTube channel Daniel Rosa here I want to do a video on the TP-Link ER605 Load balancer or I have it running as a load balancer It's as you can see in the title here the BOMADA gigabit multi-wan VPN router I did a video about load balancers and how they're actually incredibly useful for home networking Particularly if you're doing let's say more advanced home networking and what I mean by that is doing things like Having a backup internet connection I have a whole playlist of YouTube videos I made because I spent a lot of time this summer Working on that project to get myself really really business grade very resilient home internet And the way I've achieved that the way anybody can achieve that actually is to just have more than one internet connection in your house It doesn't really matter if you're going to go with combination of fiber and satellite or DSL and cellular the idea is that you have more than one connection Therefore if one connection goes down then you can go over to connection to and the only way you're going to have no internet Is if both connections go down so you've just reduced the Likelihood of you having no internet at any one time a lot By just having a very simple ISP backed by cellular configuration high availability is is a term for this and The the magic that makes all this work on the network is basically a multi-wan writer and I talked about how They can be described as sometimes VPN writers wired writers Broadband writers. These are all actually slightly different things or SMB writers But they typically all have load balancing as a feature and they can do fail over And this is just a these are this is a category really of hardware. That's more Utilized in enterprises and businesses than in home networking, but you can totally do it I just want to show you quickly how to enable the that failover is you go into transmission Now what I've done by the way is if I just show you quickly my one configuration. I have you can enable up to three the ports or Describe up to three of the ports as one ports. There's five ports on this device in total. They are Gigabit ports so they can they can have throughput up to So, you know, you're not gonna have they're not one ten one hundred ports like some of the older TP link load balancers and I've described two of these as ones and basically that ISP that cellular and then in the bandwidth, sorry load balancing Menu here. You have to apparently enable this for this to work correctly It doesn't really make sense to me that that would be the case just to do failover, which is all I'm doing and because That's not really don't balancing But you do have to take that on and then this is where you can figure the backup rule And my one is pretty much as simple as could be if one goes down Then one being one one being ISP then move me over, please on to one One two really Which is a second one port and which is cellular so that rules in place and this Manages my whole network everything wired everything wireless comes off this load balancer and this provides Routing for my entire home network and has that backup built into it now When you pick this guy up, you might want to just check the firmware that it's running to make sure It's up to date never assume when you buy when you buy hardware from even reputable tech shops Could just be it's a slightly older model or the firm has had a few upgrades So it's always one of the first things I do after jotting down the serial number Which I always also recommend is to just check if there is a firmware upgrade Some of them have automatic firmware upgrading tools others others are a bit manual The TP-Link one is on the more manual side So you have two numbers here your firmware version on your hardware version Both of these are really useful if you're interacting with TP-Link support They in the TP-Link community forum When you start a thread there is a space for these the more info if you're having any trouble With the TP-Link product whether you're looking for community support or official TP-Link support the more info You can provide them with the easier. It's going to be to diagnose your issue So I just know these two numbers So I'm using v1 1.0 of the ER605 as you can see here and the firmware version I'm running currently is at this one here. So What you what you would do to check if this is new or old firmware is go on to the product page of your TP-Link product This is the ER605. It's in TP-Link business as I mentioned These kind of writers that are going to have load balancing and failover as a feature are more Intended for business users than consumers just a tidbit to be aware of Click into support. I'm just opened it up in another tab here for convenience and You're going to get a page like this download for ER605 v1.6 So you have to be very very careful because I'm not running v1. I don't have v1.6 My hardware is v1 so first order of business would be to change that over to one and There's also the omatter controlling so far, but just click into firmware here and This is it So you can see the latest firmware at the time I'm recording this video was ER605 Unv1.1202 you can kind of see the nomen click tour That's year 2021 07 for presumably the TP-Link engineer is finished wrap this up at the end of July 07 23 And as it does mention just make doubly sure that you're looking at the right product here ER605 UN UN in brackets look on the back of your product to make sure that that is what you actually have and I'm not going to go ahead and flash the firmware because I have the latest one running You can click on download and you can see you're going to get a zip file and all you need to do basically is Extract the zip now. I'm using linux So it's gonna look a little bit different if you're on Windows, but just extract the bin file That's the actual firmware file extract this then you want to go into the firmware upgrade tool or Utility I should say within system tools management browse that click upgrade and then the firmware upgrade is going to happen And then the load balancer is going to reboot and that is the process complete You've just backed up the firmware a good idea actually before you do that Just to go into the backup and restore and take a backup of your current settings just in case anything goes wrong And you can restore from the later, but usually it's fine So just double check before you upgrade the firmware you're upgrading you're making sure that you're looking at the firmware for the right Hardware and just check what you have you can see I'm running 2021 07 to straight to 3 and that is the latest one Therefore, there's no need for me to upgrade, but you know check back every Six months to one year you can get a feel for how often they push it upgrades. This was released in August This guy was released in March and they kind of a little change lock here for bugs They resolved with each successive upgrade Etc. You can see just just as if you're upgrading something, you know Operating system you can take a look at what new features are added and see if it's worth your while With doing the firmware upgrade, but probably a good idea. So check check back bookmark I would recommend bookmarking bookmarking the firmware URL and perhaps putting a calendar entry in your Google Calendar Just you know check back every six months or once a year and if there is a more up-to-date firmware Then go ahead and flash that onto your hardware. Thank you guys for watching and more videos coming soon