First-class support for the concept of an on-demand backup connection

Feature Requests
1

Right now, for WAN fail-over, users are recommended to install mwan3, which is unnecessarily complicated for a pure fail-over case because it also supports load balancing. But even then, a simple feature request to bring up the LTE connection only when the main WAN fails (because of per-day payment) was rejected as something that would be better implemented in a custom script.

Well, this is an attempt to reconsider this decision, as this is a core feature of some ISP routers, and therefore should not require scripting if OpenWrt wants to stay competitive.

I would even say that this should be a core feature, not requiring mwan3.

The logic should be as follows: the user must be able to designate connection A as an on-demand backup for connection B, and then connection A should be brought up only if connection B is down for some time, or up on paper but does not actually work (so a "periodic connectivity check" feature is a pre-requisite).

Note: my current LTE ISP does not charge per day of usage, but the old one (back in Russia) did.

1 Like
2

You're welcome to contribute the code, either by converting mwan3 to nft-supporting mwan4 and adding it there or by creating your own package for such a "core" feature.

IMHO it's a very fringe use case. You want to toggle different connections based on your desire to pay less for metered (either traffic or usage time) connections where the advanced world is moving towards pretty much unlimited connections with the monthly fees.

3

It doesn't make sense to pay monthly fees for a connection that is going to be used less than one day per month, on average.

4

That depends on how critical it is the connection remain online.