AKA “Spectrum has gone down two weeks in a row and I am sick of it”.
I have been borrowing a transportable 5G gateway from my Dad for a couple of weeks, for testing… and two weeks in a row, I’ve used it as a backup Web choice, since my Spectrum Enterprise cable Web has gone down.
And sure, I would get AT&T Fiber if I had the choice, sadly they do not but present service at my studio. So I am caught with just one excessive velocity wired supplier. I’ll add by myself 5G backup Web connection sooner or later, however we’re getting off observe.
The primary outage, I unplugged my Cable modem from my ETH1 port, and plugged within the 5G gateway. I then rebooted the router, and in addition my fundamental Mac (it is DHCP and DNS caching appears very aggressive, a minimum of for Safari’s networking stack).
That works, but it surely’s fairly inconvenient, as a result of I needed to hold checking on Spectrum’s Web standing, then when it was lastly again up, I needed to stroll again and re-plug my cable modem into my router, and reboot every part once more.
Would not or not it’s simpler if I might simply… do it in software program?
OPNsense and twin WAN
My plan was to plug the 5G gateway into ‘ETH2’ (the third Ethernet port on my OPNsense field; ETH0 went to my LAN, ETH1 was for the Cable modem, and ETH2 and ETH3 can be found—all are 2.5 Gbps ports).
‘ETH2’ was system ‘igc2’, so I logged into OPNsense, and underneath Interfaces > Assignments, I assigned new interface ‘igc2’ named ‘WAN2’.
Then I clicked on WAN2 within the sidebar, and altered the next settings:
Allow (checked)IPv4 Configuration Kind: DHCP
Click on ‘Save’, then ‘Apply Modifications’ (on the prime), then go to System > Gateways > Configuration, and ensure your new WAN2 gateway has appeared there.
(Since I do not need automated failover, I will not arrange any particular guidelines / displays right here, however you’ll be able to determine that out by yourself if you’d like that.)
Go to Firewall > NAT > Outbound and ensure you have ‘Automated outbound NAT’ arrange. If it’s not arrange, it’s possible you’ll want so as to add a rule for the WAN2 interface.
Failover
To truly failover to WAN2:
Go to System > Gateways > ConfigurationEdit WAN2_DHCP, and set the Precedence to “1” (and ensure it’s not ‘Disabled’)Edit WAN_DHCP, and set the Precedence to “2”Click on ‘Apply’ and wait a couple of seconds
I normally use curl icanhazip.com or go to quick.com to find out which connection my laptop’s really utilizing at any given second.
To change again, set WAN2_DHCP to “2” (or extra), and WAN_DHCP to “1” (ensuring it’s not ‘Disabled’), and click on ‘Apply’ once more.
