Any Dual Wan Router Recommendations?

[ComputerRepairTech]

“I'm looking for something rock solid as if every time it has issues has a 15% chance for someone to lose their job.”

For heavens sake.. get yourself something with good support. We standardized on SonicWall. Ultra reliable, and with the paid subscription come excellent support for the most part. If you happen to hit a port tech just call back and you’ll get somone great.

One thing... I’d stay away from pfsense or any other free option unless you are VERY familiar with one of those already (which is unlikely since your asking the question..) because if something hits the fan.. there is no one being paid to help you out of that ditch..

If I have to call support theres already an issue.

You believe that I would not be asking the question about dual wan routers if I was very familiar with pfsense? In my opinion pfsense is kind of a joke when it comes to dual wan.

I am still using Untangle, its actually very very good, I have encountered issues in my testing but it was always after I was doing some big change like for example after restoring from a backup configuration.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

One thing... I’d stay away from pfsense or any other free option unless you are VERY familiar with one of those already (which is unlikely since your asking the question..) because if something hits the fan.. there is no one being paid to help you out of that ditch..

Assuming *nix distros are only "free", without support, is a mistake. Do you know PFSense has paid for support? As well as many hardware vendors that sell appliances with PFSense (or other distros).

I've been a reseller of Untangle going back to when it was version 5.
And of Sonicwall..back when they had "Gold Partners" you'd purchase from, going back to the SOHO3 models..back in the Win9X/NT 4 days. We don't do Sonicwalls much anymore these days (I think my last sale was about 2 years ago, another tech of ours probably last year), but just to compare support...Untangles support blows_them_out_of_the_water!!!

 

[NETWizz]

If I had a 15% chance of loosing my job I would be buying two (2) WAN routers each with two power supplies, and they would not be just about any of the brands mentioned...

I would buy genuine Cisco for example a Cisco ASR-1001X would probably be what I would spec. The question I have is how do you run your WAN is it BGP? The reason I ask is it makes a huge difference for redundancy.

Is this also serving as an Internet circuit? The reason is you do not want to serve as an Autonomous System Border Router on the Internet as you might carry traffic in from one provider and out the other for public traffic if you don't set it up right.

********

If you don't run BGP, you can track an object and setup failover to the other provider.

 

[NETWizz]

Bit late to the party but if the connection is absolutely mission critical you should look into high availability or VRRP. This involves having 2 or more routers where one acts as the primary and the others are slave/hot-spare. If the primary fails another takes over.

Have a look at this webinar. About 6-7 minutes in there is a demo where they cut power to the primary router. Network goes down for about 10 seconds until the secondary kicks in and takes over.

The demo uses Draytek however Untangle is capable of the same feature. I'm not sure on their licencing though - if you need full licences both the hot-spare and the primary it could work out quite expensive.

EDIT:
Guess I should post that webinar link.

You are, indeed, correct, but HSRP is a Gateway Redundancy protocol very much like HSRP only not Cisco proprietary. GLBP is the other one and actually load balances between the two vs setting one active and the other standby.

Regardless, neither of them are routing redundancy protocols that are going to get you to two different circuits unless you have a different circuit on each router, which is certainly do-able.

The biggest problem with any Gateway Redundancy Protocol is that if the router itself is up even if the circuit fails, it does not automatically switch over, so at the very least you need each provider coming into each router.

 

[crewman1]

That's the trap to avoid - if quoting something "free" remember to factor in time for you to learn it, support it, deal with poor upgrade paths, etc. and get paid for it.

Bingo. You could not have stressed this better..

 

[Choppie]

Mikrotik

also, I think the Araknis have dual wan. I'm not sure if that's just fail over.

Araknis AN-310-RT-4L2W

4 LAN ports, 2 WAN ports

 

[JoelM]

Araknis AN-310-RT-4L2W

4 LAN ports, 2 WAN ports

Really??? This post was over 5 years old!

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Long overdue thread....most of the Ubiquiti Unifi gateways work really well now with multi WAN.
Stopped doing Untangle a couple of years ago.