Hey,
My house has two different ISP connections coming in at opposite ends (a leftover from a previous arrangement). The Wi-Fi coverage from a single router on either end is not great.
Running new cable is not viable right now (it's more than a 100m run, and would require a lot of drilling), however there is one existing Ethernet cable already running between the two locations.
Sourcing OpenWRT routers that have 1G ports were difficult enough, and I was able to find two that I want to use with the single trunk cable to create a network with:
- Roaming (802.11r)
- ISP Failover
- ISP Loadbalancing
Both of my routers are running OpenWRT 24.10 on D-Link DIR-853 A3s which don’t have the most wonderful coverage, but they do get the job done decently together in terms of covering everything.
My idea was to have R1 run on 10.0.0.1/8 with one of the ISP uplinks in its WAN port, running DHCP, DNS, etc. alongside mwan3.
Based on what I’ve been able to gather, I would then also have a wan2 interface on something like eth0.10 which would get its IP from the second Router ISP.
lan could then be eth0.20 perhaps, and mwan3 could do its thing with wan and wan2.
On my second router, I would mostly have it be a dumb AP / WAN bridge on 10.0.0.2, no DHCP, and for lan have the gateway be 10.0.0.1.
Now for the tricky part which is the WAN passthrough, im not entirely sure what to do. My idea was to create a new device called something like transit with the physical wan port on my second router and eth0.10.
My questions are mostly just is this even possible?
Of course there’s the challenge that my public ip would bounce around between the two uplinks, what are the biggest concerns for something like that, and what other stuff (e.g. firewalls or whatever) will I have to deal with in order to get this all done?
I’m pretty inexperienced with all of this and so there’s a lot of unknown unknowns for me unfortunately, but I’m really hoping that this is doable. Thanks in advance for all the feedback 