 Hi there, welcome back to my YouTube channel. This is Daniel Rossell here and I'm in good good form today because I have just finished setting up My home networking dream setup that I've been trying to really get right for the last couple of weeks now I have had a backup slash failover internet system running for a couple of weeks The problem is that it wasn't really what I intended to do the cellular router. I bought from TP link I only discovered after purchasing doesn't support bridging mode so you can't just take a Cellular the cellular connectivity coming from it and put that into something like a load balancing router now I did a bit of digging through the TP link forums and played around with it and eventually figured out a way to do that That does work and that works in such a way that we can get the connection into the load balancer So the purpose of this uh video and these blog posts I wrote today is just to explain to anybody else Who's looking to do this how I got everything working finally? um And yeah, I mean I basically got cellular internet because my isp connectivity Was kind of rocky it would go down a lot like almost every day And I figured anyway, it's something I really always wanted to have this kind of idea of backup or failover internet Um something if you're working from home, you're running a business from home Two people running a business from home having some kind of backup internet connectivity If cellular is cheap now where I'm based in the world I can get a data only 4g plan for like nine dollars per month So cellular is pretty cheap So I feel like if it's that kind of a cost and you can justify it because you work from home I think something like this is really worth doing Um, so without more ado or further ado, let me just I just put together this presentation And this is a bit old school, but it's the quickest way I can think of of like narrating What I've done and how I got the components working So, um, my objective basically was reducing down downtime because my isp was unreliable And I wanted to get a cellular connectivity in place to have automatic failover now something I Sort of question I put into my blog is well Why couldn't you just use a hotspot or use a my fi and the answer is basically that This is many advantages the way I've networked this Um, it provides that backup connectivity for every single device in the house Including the wired devices including the wireless devices. This also happens automatically So you don't need to jump on to a cellular network and jump back to a Your primary network this will the load balancer will will handle absolutely all of this automatically So I think that's a lot better. Secondly stuff like using a hotspot I used to do it before I built out the system and it's just awkward. You need to use your phone What if your phone's out of battery? Everybody's jumping on and off the hotspot? So this is a much more robust solution if you need something of this nature So that was the objective the problem So the problem that I ran into was that after I bought the TP link cellular router As I said, I discovered it doesn't do bridging now. Um, there are LTE 4g cellular even 5g routers on the market that will do bridging So one option would have been to just buy one of those I don't want to do that because what can I say I'm building this out on a budget and I just spent 120 bucks on hardware So I figured with a bit of time and effort I could figure out a way to get it to work and I did now there's actually one more advantage to Keeping your cellular network and your main network separate and I'll get to that at the end of this presentation But that's something called bonding so Bonding load balancing and failover are three different concepts bonding is this is this kind of cool idea actually of Let's take all the internet connections we can get let's aggregate the connection speeds and let's give us one really Fast internet that's also got failover built into it. The problem with bonding is that it's not easy You need to have hardware on the isp side and you need to have the hardware on your side There's a project called open mptc, but you also need a vps. So If you have if you're going to do it like this and keep your cellular router running and keep your Load balancer running. Well, there's actually something clever You could do which is running a wi-fi network off that 3g router or even running ethernet off it Putting that as well as a load balancing router Into your computer if you have a network interface card With two ethernet ports you could do this very easily or just use wi-fi and ethernet And you could use a program like speedify to bond your cellular connection With your failover connection while the same cellular cellular connection is also Providing automatic failover. So that's one reason I can just think of and I wanted to Highlight for why you might want to do it in this manner. Um, also just kind of philosophically Part of me says it's better to just have one piece of hardware that does everything It'll do your 4g modem. It'll do your Dual wan it'll do it'll do your everything else you might need Part of me also says well for troubleshooting it might be easier to build it piece by piece So the solution as I said is you could just buy an LTE Cellular router that does bridging or you could play around with the TP link one, which is what I did So here's what I did basically. I firstly disabled the wi-fi And in contradiction to what I just said Um, I did that because if you don't want to do bonding on the network as well Well, there's no point having the wi-fi Using the wi-fi coming off that cellular network, right because If you put an access point at the other side of the load balancer You're going to be you can put out a wi-fi network that has the Automatic failover slash backup built into it. So therefore there's no advantage to having a wi-fi Network upstream of load balancing. So disabled the wi-fi network now here's Here was the breakthrough thanks to kevin and the TP link forums And that was basically I just needed to assign an IP address now to people who are really internet working This might seem like well, obviously to me. I'm just learning this. So it was like Oh, wow, this finally works. So all I had to do was basically check The IP range from the load balancer and assign an IP address To the cellular router that was within that range And then do static routing now. They did say that you're supposed to disable the DHCP Um, I didn't actually do that and it still works the problem I get whenever I take down a DHCP server is that I find it very hard to get into the device So when I took that down I couldn't get into the cellular and why would you want to get into it just to check everything's working Maybe change a few settings. So at the risk of maybe making the network less stable I decided to keep the DHCP server up and But it is it is running So I'm just showing the screenshots of sort of what I did to make this work This is as you can see, this is the load balancer its web interface and it shows The the DHCP server page shows where the IP addresses start and where they end And I just picked a random number that wasn't in use by something That had a reserved address. So I said 103 Or I can't remember if it was 103 or 105 or 107, but whatever it was I just picked a number at random In that range and I Gave that address to the cellular router. So then when I went into the cellular router, I put in that IP address Now if you turn off the DHCP server, you'll still have the option to configure manually the IP address And again, just make sure this is done in coordination And now what you can actually do is give the load balancer an address reservation From the cellular router. I'm not sure if that's the correct way to do it That's what I ended up doing. So give the load balancer the reservation from the cellular router And not vice versa because that address reservation system in the load balancer is for reserving Is for binding MAC addresses to LAN local local IP addresses So as I just mentioned static IP assignment and that's basically it. So I have now my ISP router And I have my cellular router both products are from TP-Link They're both going into the load balancer the load balancer is then going into I mean, this is just one more layer of complication But if you're already building out this setup, uh, what's one more piece of gear, right? So the final thing I have is a router from TP-Link that's running as an access point only And its only job is to put out a Wi-Fi network from the load balancer that has the benefit of this backup built into it So all in all besides my ISP router. I have the Cellular router the load balancer and the AP so three more pieces of hardware that weren't on my network before and as I said If you are prepared to spend More money like five or six hundred dollars or a thousand dollars You could definitely find yourself a more advanced load balancer that would be able to give out a Wi-Fi network and that would cut your Hardware down a bit, but again There are things you can do if you separate out the hardware So you might want to put the access point 10 meters over that way Well, if you have it just at the end of the load balancer just run along ethernet cable If the Wi-Fi is in the load balancer either you need to get the load balancer to a place that you want to put a Wi-Fi from Or you've just you or you have Wi-Fi in it for no reason because you're using the AP anyway So that's what i'm saying about sort of separating components seems like a lot of work But maybe there are there are there are definitely some advantages I can think of so the fail over now is really really quick if I pull out the ethernet from the ISP network in the load balancer I fail over to cellular Pretty much instantaneously. I called it here under two seconds By contrast in my first setup when I had ISP Running into the cellular router and the cellular router was running in three four g backup mode This is the tp link tlm or 100 and when it was responsible for failover That failover took about 20 to 30 seconds and the reason i'm guessing is that well the 3g connection probably isn't live Until it's required. So it has to firstly detect failover Firstly detect failure on one one on the ISP Then it has to bring up that cellular line Then it needs to switch over Then it needs to switch back whereas if you're using the load balancer for this My theory or my guess work is that well everything's always online And all the load balancer has to do is say well, that's not working Let's pull from this and that process can happen very very quickly. So um, I also created a Load balancing rule here and you can see what the rule is. It's pretty simple Um to find this in the tp link r470t Just go into load balancing under transmission and click into link backup on my rules Just well if one one is down one one being the ISP internet go over to one two Which is the cellular router and it automatically brings it back and I've tested this and it works beautifully So here's the setup I've been describing in diagram format I have my ISP router running as a bridge or it should be running as a bridge I should say sometimes you can change that why keep the ISP router at all Well, sometimes you need to keep it for to get support from the ISP So sometimes I think it's useful in my case The modem is hard to find in a load balancer vdsl2. So that's another reason you just want to say well At least I know this piece of hardware. We're bringing the ISP's internet So let's just keep that in place and add stuff afterwards Or you can be a bit more aggressive and say let's try to get that modem and let's find the load balancer That has that modem and the wi-fi and then I've only got one box to worry about Um, but this is the way I've done it ISP and cellular router. They're both going into the load balancer From the load balancer. We're networking the whole house So there's an ethernet switch bringing ethernet to everything that's wired from the nas to the computer I'm recording this on to another networking switch everything And there is an access point a router running an access point Bringing wireless all over the house as well wireless printers wireless phone devices, whatever My my my heart will always lie with ethernet connectivity So that's the diagram and this is the diagram with the actual Examples of the TP-Link gear plotted on it Cellular router is something like the MTL MR100 or you could use the MR6400 something a bit fancier Bringing that in to the load balancer That box the r470t there's also the r480t Now I have to point out that my home internet's pretty slow It's VDSL if you have something like fiber optic internet You're naturally going to want to get a better load balancer that has ports with enough throughput. So like Gigabit ports right so Choose your load balancer based on What your connectivity is and what your speeds are and then pick something that won't create a bottleneck because if you've got A 300 megabit per second connection Wired into a load balancer that can only take in or give out 100 Then for no reason you've just lost two thirds of your network speed So that's a concern there and then um running out a As I said the wi-fi so that's just kind of showing you the gear And tidy it up as you as you can now here here's my final sort of idea That I mentioned I don't know if this if this would actually work I haven't tried it out yet But what you what I suspect you could do is run off some ethernet from that cellular router It's already going into the load balancer, but run out another LAN port So again up for up for something a bit better than the TL MR 100 Go for something with a few LAN ports take another ethernet um from Well, I've done it from the From the archer demonstrating doing this by wi-fi, but let's say you had a few Ethernet ports on your computer and you could Plug in two incoming ethernet So in that case take it off the load balancer Then run speedify on your computer and then what I think would work would be you'd be able to actually bond the connectivity from cellular and the load balancer and Everybody else so you'd have bonding and failover everybody else on the network would just have bonding unless they wanted to do the same thing With speedify that's just kind of taking it to the next level But the truth is I've come to the conclusion that for my networking needs. I don't really need very fast internet I just need internet that doesn't go down like every single day So high availability is what I think my use case is best described as and for that I'm happy enough just to have the load balancer automatically swapping over in the event of failover and keeping the internet up Throughout uh throughout the place and this is just kind of what it looks like This is the start of the network with the isp writer the load balancer and the cellular going into it And just a couple more suggestions. Well, if you're going to all this trouble Put your networking gear on a ups so that in tiny power outages Doesn't bring the whole stack crashing down and the final thing I recommend is uh, if you if you are going for a cellular 4g that has External antennas, so if you have a load balancer that only takes a plug-in device unless that plug-in gadget has Check the specs, but if you have external antenna support You may want to put your antenna on the roof Or put it outside and therefore bring in better quality 4g and that'll just mean that in the event you do fail over to cellular Your cellular is going to be As good as possible now just a quick a couple of examples of well Here is as I said something you could do to make this a bit easier You could get yourself something like one of the dreitech lte routers Some of these guys have a vds l2 modem in them Um, but most of the the newer ones have gigabit ports So you could run really fast internet Into one one you could run Uh cellular off a usb modem that's compatible with the dreitech Um, you could keep your isps router or your fiber optic to ethernet adapter and just put those in And that'll also give you out your wi-fi network. So Something like this would simplify the setup a bit Um, but um, it's going to cost you these are expensive gadgets for Uh business networking really so uh, and I'm just just showing that thing in the spec that has a five It has two dual band wi-fi connectivity So I hope this video has been useful and not too too much info I mean I've been playing around with this networking setup for a couple of weeks now trying out different things and I was just frustrated because I knew I could figure out some way to get these two appliances Into the load balancer and I think that's just the better way to do this because You've got one sort of specialist piece of hardware Whose job it is to balance connections and to do stuff like load balancing I'm not even doing load balancing, but you could also set that up Um, that it's a it's a piece of gear that's designed to take in multiple one connections Do stuff like failover do stuff like load balancing put out connections to the local area network And I think it's better than relying on a functionality In let's say the cellular Rider that would have oh it can do failover back and forth between a cellular line and an isp line But it's not really what it's intended for and the uh difference in time of failover between two Seconds and 30 seconds is very noticeable So, um, hope that video was interesting If you'd like to get more videos from me on all subjects related to technology home networking Linux and a whole bunch of other stuff Please feel free to subscribe to this youtube channel. Thank you very much for watching