Loadbalancing an lte modem and a ubiquiti bullet

[farotherside]

hey all,

(hello from the anchorage in La Paz, Mexico!)

I got frustrated dealing with the bugs in my Redport Optimizer setup on my little fulltime-cruising sailboat, threw in the towel, and am trying to build a suitable replacement. I have a WiFiX NEXQ6GO running GoldenOrb_2021-09-29 with a Sierra Wireless MC7455 installed, and I have a new Ubiquiti Bullet M2-HP mounted on my solar arch outside.

What I ultimately want is the ability for me (or less-technical crew) to use the Bullet to connect to open or known-password wireless access points that we can reach from the anchorage, and if that fails, route traffic through the MC7455, which has a GoogleFi sim installed. We cannot use the GoogleFi connection fulltime; we burn through the alotted 22gb/month in under a week every time.

I've got mwan3 setup and configured (I think), but I am struggling with the terminology of "interfaces" in OpenWRT... if I hard-wire the Bullet to my pc I can connect to remote access points and route data that way fine, and if I connect the NEXQ6GO to the pc I see the mc7455 and can connect to the internet through it... but I can't seem to figure out how to get the Bullet attached to the NEXQ6GO in such a way that I can route traffic through it while still being able to log directly into the bullet to change wifi access points. is there somewhere that I can set a route so that my pc can talk directly to the bullet?

I'm pretty sure there's something easy that I'm missing, but there's a lot of moving parts here so I'm getting frustrated again. is my basic premise sound? has anyone built a similar setup? I can't find a tutorial that explains exactly how to configure an upstream router as a member of an mwan3 group...

sorry if this is vague. argh.

[mk24]

I thought that mwan3 just chooses a default route-- all the regular routes are still in place and usable. Assuming the Bullet is configured as a router (the public wifi on the wan side, your network on the LAN side with a DHCP server), setting up an interface for the Bullet with proto DHCP should install a route to the Bullet's lan network, which is from your view one of the WANs.

Of course make sure all your networks have non-overlapping subnets for proper routing.

Your use case is actually failover not load balancing, since you don't want the LTE to be used at all while wifi is available.

[farotherside]

holy crap it was that easy, I really was overlooking something stupid. of course the Bullet needs a DHCP server enabled on it to allow the NEXQ6GO to connect the interface. I had it in my head that the Bullet would get an IP from the NEXQ6GO, which is of course not how that works at all.

thanks for sorting me out! I love this forum.