2 ISP's, 2 routers, 1 LAN and a giant ? lol

Networking
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I have 2 ISP’s at my house that I have been hopping back and forth on manually in the past as needed. I’m somewhat beginning the process of converging both WAN’s to the same LAN using 2 separate routers. For now of course, there’s still a manual process if I need to use the non-default WAN at any given time (changing DGW on the client).

The scenario is that one ISP is 50Mbps up and down, and the other is like 30 up and 300 down. The 50/50 connection is from a local wireless provider (I’m like 3 blocks outside of their 1 Gbps fiber service, darnit!). I have static public IP’s on it as well, so that’s what will be hosting my main WAN-facing services. The other ISP is cable residential, so it’s DHCP WAN ( I know DynDNS is a thing, not high on my priority list at the moment ).

It’s REALLY nice when I’m downloading gobs of ISO’s, Steam apps, etc. to be on the cable connection, obviously. As for day to day activities that don’t require lots of ingress bandwidth, I just let devices do whatever they’re currently on at the time. I’ve set up a LANCACHE server (mostly for Steam to start with; I setup the monolithic deployment so from what I understand it’ll cache a bunch of stuff besides Steam out of the box like Blizzard apps, others). The way it works is LANCACHE runs a stub dns service of its own, and anything you want to be able to use LANCACH data just set that client’s DNS to the LANCACHE IP. If the DNS query is for something besides a LANCACHE-able download, LANCACHE upstreams the DNS query to the DNS server you specified in LANCACHE’s config. In this case, it’ll upstream to my LAN-hosted Technitium DNS which is pointed at Quad9 dns using encryption protocols. (NO MORE TRACKING MY SHOPPING AND PR0N HABITS, GOOGLE! AMAZON! WHOEVER! lol)

Anyway, I’m not sure how to go about this. Since I’m running all Linux stuff now, I don’t care about M$ services, and with the way the Linux world handles OS and app updates with package managers, I’m comfortable with the visibility I have into knowing WHEN I need this gateway changing sorcery to occur. Anybody have any ideas how to accomplish this or even suggestions of resources I can read up on that would “learn me” a few options? Both routers are running OpenWRT.

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I am having trouble understanding exactly what you want, but I think what your asking is how to combine ISPs services/routers into 1 LAN where you don’t have to switch between them each time. The best solution for you would be using a old PC with a add on 4 port NIC along with a system like PFSense or OPNSense. You can plug both ISP routers into PFsense and configure them as Gateways. Than set up a gateway group and use that for routing between your wan and lan. I have done this for myself and many customers. If you can set the ISRs you have in bridge mode that allows you to basically make the ISP routers transparent and the new PFsense/OPNsense box you created becomes the router for your LAN and just combines those connections in this case.

2 Likes
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Why don’t you just use one router?

3 Likes
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Appreciate the suggestion, I’ll keep that in mind. I will eventually combine them on my OpenWRT. I haven’t done that yet because then I have to get out of my chair to run cables and bend over a lot. I’m fat so I’ll get winded and sweaty, and overall I prefer to just sit on my a** if at all possible. :wink:

As for “what I want”, I’d want some kind of stub routing provisions like LANCACHE provides, but to extend that to anything and everything of my choosing. Like maybe I want all WiFi devices to only use the cable WAN and all my wired devices to default to the 50/50 wireless ISP. But if said wired device needs to do a giant download like updating app packages, then the traffic would automatically/intelligently get piped over to the cable WAN. LANCACHE does this by acting as a DNS proxy basically, so I guess what I’m wanting is to “roll my own” additional type of stub routing in that sense.