I am not an expert!
I am in a rental house in France that has no fixed line coming in (it is usually a holiday gite). We are here for 18 to 24 months while we rebuild a house destroyed in a fire. The mobile 4G signals are pretty bad but when they work they are OK. Free using Orange is stronger than SFR here.
I have invested in two 4G receivers, one using a Free (it is the name of the company) sim, the other using my usual SFR sim. The Free sim piggy backs the Orange network which is much stronger than my usual supplier SFR at this house.
Both connections can be flaky and both are limited to 200 GB a month and we need about 300 to follow UK internet TV plus all the other things we do.
So after reading up it seemed sensible to try to combine these two 4G inputs through my openwrt router to give a load balanced system that would use both suppliers and spread the load to ensure we had full access to the 400GB without having to switch from one to the other (which is what I have been doing).
So I have the Free router (a private tp-link MR600) feeding its internet into the WAN port of my openwrt router running openwrt 20.02.2 and my SFR 4G router feeding its internet into the LAN4 port of the same router. The Free box is set to 192.168.1.1 and the SFR box is set to 192.168.0.1. The openwrt router runs the LAN and wifi for the house using a network of 10.0.0.0/24 with the router on 10.0.0.1.
To complicate matters I have a private VPN that the openwrt router accesses using policy based routing but thus far it does not appear to have any impact on what I am trying to do (and I do not think it should).
I tried to use the information in this tutorial:-
to change LAN4 to a second WAN interface called WAN_SFR but could not find the entry for the switch controller.
After reading and searching it says that my version of openwrt uses DSA in lieu of swconfig so I used this information:-
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wan/multiwan/mwan3
to unlink LAN4 and reset it as a WAN port called WAN_SFR
I have also disabled the original WAN port and generated a new WAN interface called WAN_FREE.
I then followed the tutorial and managed to generate the load balancing interfaces, members, policies and rules but I cannot get it to work properly.
I appear to be using just the new WAN_FREE interface on my internal network. I have disabled the original WAN interface and even removed its static address to make sure it is not being used (but not yet dared to delete it) and I am still accessing the internet over the internal machines. However the RX and TX statistics are still being (identically) shown on both the new WAN_FREE interface and the old, disabled WAN interface and I do not understand why. The WAN_SFR interface is not working at all and the RX and TX remain at 0.
I can ping 192.168.1.1 and 192.168.1.20 (the fixed IP for the WAN_FREE interface) from the openwrt router and from a local LAN machine but I cannot ping 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.0.20 (the fixed IP for the WAN_SFR interface) from anywhere.
When I look at Status:Load Balancing the MWAN Interfaces page shows the original WAN interface in red with a status of offline and the two new interfaces in orange (yellow?) with a status of Disabled with no up or downtime shown.
Using DHCP in lieu of fixed IP on the WAN_SFR port does nothing as the network 192.168.0.0/24 cannot be found.
The interface is currently set to use device LAN4 but there is also a device called Software VLAN: βlan4.1β however changing the settings to use this does not appear to make any difference.
I am a bit frustrated as I seem to have got half then system working and cannot work out how to get the second WAN to run. At least the internet is still working!
Can anyone help me solve this? I will post whatever information is needed if you tell me what you need and how I generate it.
Thanks,
Geoff