MikroTik RB750Gr3 + Pihole + load balancing + IPv6

Hello everybody!

Currently I have a Cisco RV340 load balancing 2 ISPs on its WANs, and a Ubuntu server with some services including Pihole which is responsible for my LAN's DHCPv4, DNS service and local domain names.

I'm very frustrated with RV340, as its IPv6 support seems to be limited. A few weeks ago I bought my server and installed Ubuntu on it, Pihole, and started setting up things. As I tried to port forward, I discovered that one of my ISPs got me on CGNAT, so I decided to get IPv6 working. After a lot of trouble, I managed to get one ISP's global prefix (I bridged its modem) delegated from RV340's WAN to its VLAN by DHCP-PD and its DHCPv6 to set addresses to my devices.

But while my Ubuntu server succeeds in ipv6-test.com, my Win7 and Win10 still don't work, RV340 seems to not support ULA parallel to global prefix, and in the other ISP's modem (routed), global prefix delegation shows as unavailable, therefore load balancing also doesn't work.

I'm also unable to delegate global prefix from RV340 to Ubuntu's Pihole, or get ULA working so that I have ISP independent fixed addresses so I can set local domain names to my devices. I'm not even able to use Pihole as my DHCPv6 server, I'm using RV340 still.

So, I'm thinking on moving to a more featurish router. OpenWRT seems to be the best one in all comparisons I saw, and among the routers listed as supported by it I was able to find MikroTik RB750Gr3 on sale.

But before buying it and learning how to install OpenWRT on it, I'd like some advices first.

  1. Does it support load balancing? Is Mwan3 the way to go?

1.1) If so, how would it work? I'd set 2 of its 5 ports as WANs and have the other 3 for my LAN?

  1. Does it have enough resources to run Pihole on it? Since I'll have a linux-based router, I'd like to have a Pihole instance on it and a secondary one on my Ubuntu.

2.1) I also use BIND as a forwarder for Pihole's dnsmasq, as there are some settings I prefer doing on it. And I keep these settings on a Subversion repo. Is RB750Gr3 able to run these softwares and OpenWRT has a Subversion client available?

  1. I read at https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/ipv6/start OpenWRT has full support for IPv6, I haven't read the whole article yet. Is it able to receive global prefix from ISP (both my ISPs provide me only a /64 prefix, I doubt any of them would give me a bigger one, but I haven't tried asking yet) and pass it to LAN?

3.1) Is it able to handle both global prefixes and ULAs, all together? (yeah x.x)

3.2) Is it possible to use Pihole's dnsmasq as DHCP server (IPv4 and IPv6) instead of OpenWRT default one, with proper IPv6 DHCP-PD?

  1. In case I'm lucky and all answers are positive, how'd it handle IPv6 load balancing and double global prefixes?

  2. If RB750Gr3 doesn't have enough resources to run these described needs, is there any OpenWRT supported router you could suggest?

I know it's a lot and I apologize for so many questions and noob talks, I've never tried OpenWRT. I'm willing to learn as I've been learning a lot about Ubuntu/linux and network on past few weeks, I just wanna make sure the OS and hardware support these (sadly) very specific needs as I'm struggling to get them working on my current setup, and don't wanna spend money and a lot of time trying to get it working on a new one just to find out it won't work again.

Thanks a lot for any help and suggestion.

@Hikari, welcome to the community!

Yes. Yes, most use this.

I thought you wanted to run OpenWrt. If you mean on the network, yes, of course.

Yes.

Yes.

Yes.

I've never setup a PiHole or double Global IPv6 - let alone on dual WANs, so I hope someone else can respond to that.

Enjoy OpenWrt!

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Hello, thank you a lot!

Sorry indeed I wasn't clear. I wanna install OpenWRT as its OS and setup load balancing, and on top of it install Pihole, BIND and Subversion client. I might also need cifs to mount SMB shares from my NAS. And of course WebUI. The rest of stuff I'll keep on my server. How much RAM should a router need to run this?

Pihole doesn't support it, I was suggested on their forum to ask help on dnsmasq community. If dnsmasq supports it I hope to be able to setup directly on its conf and Pihole just use it.

Another possibility is use OpenWRT for DHCP, but I like Pihole's UI and how IPs and names are all handled by it.

My biggest concert is to have dual global prefixes and fixed ULA working with local domain names.

Well I was reading the main thread about gr3 and got scared on how hard it is just to get OpenWRT working on it...

I looked for other devices with support and some are very expensive. I think I'd rather buy a small PC with 3 network cards and install Ubuntu on it :confused:

I just bought a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X. It seems to be very good and installs release firmware directly from network :smiley:

I'm also buying a TP-Link WR1043ND for handling WiFi. It's a very good old router and I found 1 unit on sale that's still new! So if everything goes fine I'll have 2 OpenWRT devices at hom :smiley:

Thanks again for the help! When they arrive I'll start working on them and create new threads if needed.

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