Double Your Internet Speed (Really) With pfSense Load Balancing

hello in this video I wanted to go over some of my setup with pfSense to get load-balancing to work now basically load balancing for those of you who don't know it gives you the ability to have multiple internet connections now they may be ADSL or video cell or fiber or coax or 4G it doesn't really matter you can have multiple different types if you wanted of Internet connections and then you essentially combine them all together and have effectively the speed of all of them combined and in some cases the upload of all of them combined so what I mean by that is for instance if I I'm sending a file like if I'm uploading a YouTube video that will tend to only use one of my two internet connections so the speed I'm getting on that video for the upload is essentially the maximum speed of just one of my connections however I could do two videos at once and that would use both connections so although one wouldn't be faster doing two would be as fast as if I weren't doing the other one if that makes any sense I've also noticed that for instance when I save a file to my max desktop Apple starts pushing that up to the cloud and that does use both connections as for downloads if I'm downloading something like a steam game or a Windows Update that'll automatically be using both connections and the way it does this is essentially my router requests packet a from connection one and packet B from connection to and essentially then it just harms the load so what you'll see here is I've got two gateways and both of these connections are 100 / 40 NBN connections they're both fibre to the node so that technology is VDSL so I've named them VDS l1 and vdsl2 now the actual speed I get is not 100 Meg I am five hundred meters from my node so the speed I actually get based on the line so the quality of phone line is somewhere around the 70 to 75 megabit mark so most of the time my internet connection with both combined is hovering around the 140 145 mark which I find as decent I think of that as a good enough speed I do not think seventy Meg is a good enough speed that's why I have two connections now with this setup you can do more than two connections if you wanted you could add a 4G connection or maybe a DSL connection and maybe two DSL connections a 4G connection and a coax connection it all depends what's available in your area now to get into this basically I'm going to go over first of all I'll show you the setup I actually have and how things are plugged in this is my network rack that's sitting in the kitchen so what I've got here is I've got my ISP provided modem there I've got my other eyes P provided modem there I have my HP computer there that's running pfSense and I specifically chose this machine because out of all the machines I had tested this had the lowest power consumption and I could put a nick in there quite easily that gave me another two Network ports so I have one network port that this motor is plugged into one network that's plugged into and that is the the to wear ports and then I have one more network port that connects to the network switch so then I've got the networks which then connects to all of my wireless access points it connects to my servers and it connects to the the other switch to go in the other building so then up here say these are the two phone jacks so these are the only phone jacks in the house so I've got the copper line that comes out of the street and it goes directly to the patch panel so one is one phone jack one is the other and I did get away with not having to pay for a second connections install fee because one I did this myself and two I was very specific with the ISP when I signed up that what we signed up to one first and then a few months later we got the second connection but I was very specific when I signed up for the second connection that we had to in the house already in the 90s we had a fax machine it had a different phone number so I was very specific that no we have two lines do not charge me for a second connection and they said that they would not they weren't too sure if they could do that and they would let me know if I was going to be charged and I could cancel before it got installed no one got in contact with me just got installed and it was all good however about five six months later the the person who pays for the first internet connection got a bill in their name for a new connection charge but that was quite easy to get out of because we only had to ring the company and say hey we signed up when the NBN came in and we've had a phone here for the last 30 years so clearly not a new house that's a mistake so we didn't have to pay that and you realistically if you have two lines in the house already you shouldn't have to pay there is no new set up it's it's already there the lines there so there's my two motives they're both bridged you may have been able to guess that our bridging turns off all of the like the config page and everything in the modem so when I've bridged my modems what I've actually done is first thing is I went in and disabled everything so the VoIP of the Wi-Fi turned all that off and then what I did was I got very last step was to put it in bridged mode because once you put it in bridge mode you can't access the web interface to configure anything or to do whatever and what bridge mode does is it basically turns the modem into a media converter so this modem is pretty much only here to convert the phone line to an Ethernet port so I've got the phone line that goes into line one and goes into modem one into its DSL port and then one of the yellow Ethernet ports on the back plugs into the pfsense router and the IP address it gives the the pfsense router is the IP address the isp the ISPs DHCP server is handing out so there's no double natin or anything if I want to open a port I open it in here these don't do anything so they just dumb as a sidenote what I did work out was because I want to have to be as power efficient as possible so one I'm not wasting power and to the UPS lasts as long as possible if it power does go out so what I did was these are twelve volt modems I cut the power brick off and put a custom connector on the back of this PC and why are these into the 12 volt rail of the power supply so if I do need to reboot everything - I can just shut this down and when it turns off these go off I just push the power button everything comes back up now a really good thing to have if you're doing this setup is a spare ISP supplied modem and the reason I say this is because every time I've had an issue first of all I have to double check that the issues not with me and it has been a few times so I will restart the router and one of my last after a reboot if that doesn't fix it I'll normally plug the cable straight from one of the modems into my laptop and see if I can get on the internet there if I ever have to contact my ISP they're pretty much the first thing in their script on a technical level after what color is the light and is it plugged in it is to go to the web interface now I can't there is no web interface in these once they're in bridged mode so the first few times I rang them with an issue before they could actually do anything even if like I knew the problem was outside the house I had to reset a modem go to the config page and say yes there is no sync or whatever and then I'd have to reconfigure the modem so I I was lucky enough to know someone who had a spare modem that they got from the same ISP so I keep this as a spare for when I need to do troubleshooting and I will just literally plug it in to the phone jack plug it into power plug my laptop in it's separate from my network completely if there's no internet there then I know it's not my problem I can ring the ISP straight away if there's internet there then I have to dig in find what that issue is so that's that so I'm gonna give you a bit of a speed test first show you the kind of thing that will happen if you've got the two internet connections so as I'm doing my speed test basically the router is going to request half of the packets that it's trying to download from the Optus Burwood server there it's going to request half of those packets from one connection and half from the other connection so what you're seeing here is the the data coming in from media cell one and coming in from vdsl2 and coming out of the LAN port into my switch so I have effectively doubled my internet connection because I really only get a sync speed of around 70 Meg so as you can see I getting around 140 same thing for uploads but I think uploads are a little less important the main thing I'm going to upload is going to be say a YouTube video and for some reason that only seems to want to use one of the connections so I'm limited to only one connections upload however if I were doing two YouTube videos at once being uploaded it would probably use both connections the only other thing that really doesn't like to use both connections at once is going to be if I'm using a VPN say because the tunnel can really only go through one connection it can't really go through two so I could have two separate VPN connections though maxing out the lines okay so now I want to get into the just double check yeah all right great I've got my notes here so I want to get into how I set this up in the first place so one of the first steps was to get both my interfaces there so if I go into here you see the interfaces are all there if you're if you're doing a like a forge a USB modem thing you need to get it here first this was the hardest part for me when I was doing the 4G ones and that's gonna require some config but once you at this point and you've got all your interfaces what I did was I went into each one I've labeled it I've selected DHCP because the ISP hands out my IP addresses I don't need pppoe or any of that stuff no I think there's a chance a few ISPs may but mine did not um I've got these two boxes ticked I don't remember why but they're ticked so that's how my config looks named tick tick tick okay same on the other one so that's V T sub-2 is the same different name obviously and then LAN that's the IP address of the LAN port that's basically it so um if I go into system and then routing and then Gateway groups alright so these are the two individual gateways so the Gateway itself to just under gateways here the Gateway itself is connected to an interface so I've tried to keep all of my stuff named logically so I can understand it if I'm trying to troubleshoot but basically I've selected interface or the system might have done it automatically I don't remember but basically we've selected interface to be so in this case video so on I've named it the video so one gateway so you can just see what I've ticked here description and advanced any I don't think there's anything special in here though the weight is one if that's different make them both one this all this from memory has something to do with if there's priority for a certain gateway to work like to take double the amount of the load but you want it to be even same thing for the gateway number two it's just named like that there is a monitor AP they can't be the same apparently from memory it's basically something that the the pfSense will ping from that gateway to make sure it can ping it so that's Google's DNS server and the other one was Google's other DNS server so system routing what we want to do is go into gateway groups and I can't remember if there was already one here and I edited it or if I had to add a new one but basically you want to name it something that you can work work out what it is so multi wham was my best option there I've selected both of the gateways I've given them both the same tier which I believe has something to do with how much data like I think that's because from memory if I had two connections that were a different speed I would want like the highest speed one that'd take double the amount of packets but both my interfaces at the same speed so I want them both on the same tier anyway you can see what the config is there that's just a description and I'm choosing high latency or packet loss as the trigger so what will happen is if I am connection goes down so even if they can't your pfSense can't ping that Google DNS server or whatever then it will just use the other connection so that's how I'm getting fault tolerance that like I don't have I don't notice it it just works now it actually get the load balancing set up now I've got ah basically we have a point that is both connections so the the group of multi LAN if any packet hits that multi Wang group then it's instantly going to go out of the two connections well half down one half down the other so now we need to get a way of getting the data to go to the mall TN group so that's done in the firewall so if we've got a firewall and then rules and then the notes let's say Gateway okay so we're gonna choose the the lands of the network interface and I'm gonna go to the default allow rule so basically this is the firewall rule that is that of the default rule that all your traffic is going to follow so I want traffic that hits the firewall because remember the firewalls in between the the local area network and the when I want when traffic hits it from the land so I'm requesting to download something from inside the house that it will then send it out through the multi port by the multi way so that's down here so I have selected yeah there's only down here I believe was anything had to change so I've selected the load balance group instead of one of the VDSL connections so that waits the gateway is choosing to go to the group that then sends it down both instead of just going to one it's a multi there then save now yes then there's firewall PF block rng GL IP advanced named gateway so down here and so under the pretty sure PF blocker engies and head-on so you might not even have this but if you do have a PF blocker in G then geoip down to the bottom open this up and make the custom gateway the multi when that's just because this is another firewall and you want to protect that connection and not just one of the connections there was another step that the instructions I followed told me to do but I later turned it off I'll show you what that is anyway so under system advanced in miscellaneous so system fenced miscellaneous so there is a tick box here to use sticky connections and basically this is if your computer is talking to a server so it's downloading a file using sticky connections will force that one connection there to the server to be stuck to only one interface so you only get half of your total download speed because you're only using one connection if someone else on the network were to jump on and request a file the system would send that possibly down the other network connection because it's not busy so sticky connections will kind of limit your machine and all that specific connection that's happening between your website web browser and the server it will limit that to stay in one one link now this can be useful if you visit sites that there are a few minut amount of sites that will not work properly like you may not be able to log in because some of the packets will come from a different IP address and the side will just kind of throw a fit and say no you'll get kind of stuck in a login loop I've got like one or two sides I visit that do that and it's not very common and I don't go in here and turn this on to fix it I just connect to a VPN and everything's fine so keep that in mind if you're doing this to share the internet connection with a lot of users you'll probably want to tick this because you're not trying to go for raw speed you're just trying to have internet available for a lot of people I'm going for raw speed so I've uh nicked this this allows basically anything that I've tested with the exception of a VPN and maybe one or two small things it allows them to just work at the full speed well that's it for this video hopefully it's been informative or at the very least entertaining to most of you if this video was helpful please leave a comment down below and if you liked the video please don't forget to give it a thumbs up I thank you very much for watching hopefully I'll see you next time

Channel: Aron Bezzina

Views: 78,064

Rating: 4.6885247 out of 5

Keywords: NBN, Australia, Internet, Load Balance, pfSense, Aussie Broadband, ISP, 4G, Telstra, Optus, Vodafone, Fast Internet, antenna, Double Internet speed, national broadband network, broadband, fast, FTTH, VDSL, VDSL2, ADSL, DSL, ADSL2, ADSL2+, Cable, FTTB, FTTN, FTTC, Fixed Wireless, Fiber, Fibre, Satellite, Firewall, LoadBanance, Load Balancing, Faster Internet, Fastest Internet, Make My Internet Faster, Make My Internet Quicker, Quicker Internet

Id: sFOS-6GFrs0

Length: 19min 28sec (1168 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 01 2018