With this method we ensure that if one of the gateways that pfSense uses fails, it will switch over to a working one. In this example, my internal network is the 192.168.200/24, my primary gateway router's IP is 192.168.150.1 and my backup gateway router's IP is 192.168.100.1.
First of all, make sure your interfaces and gateways are set:
Now go to System, General Setup and either change the DNS servers so they reflect the ones in the corresponding networks or use public ones. You need to make sure you have at least one DNS server per gateway. In my example I use Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).
Time to create a Gateway Group. Go to System, Routing and click on the "Groups" tab. Select "+". Here we just say that we want to prefer the 192.168.150.1 gateway unless we experience packet loss or high latency, in which case we switch to 192.168.100.1.
The following comes straight from pfSense documentation. There's no better way to desribe what those options here do.
Our configuration was pretty straight-forward considering the options. We only said that we wanted to prefer the 192.168.150.1 gateway unless we experienced packet loss or high latency, in which case we switch to 192.168.100.1. Let's add another option here. If the 192.168.100.1 gateway fails, use 192.168.150.1. Better to have degraded service than no service at all, obviously.
So our configuration should now look something like this:
Honestly, just the first rule should do the trick but I have put the second one there for illustration purposes. Time to change our LAN rules so they actually use our newly configured interfaces:
Go to Firewall, Rules and click on the "LAN" tab. Edit your LAN rules. You need to go all the way down to Gateway and click on the "Advanced" button. Choose the first gateway group you created. Save and apply.
Now, in the Rules page again go to your newly edited rule and select "+", or "add a new rule based on this one". Go ahead and change the gateway to the other gateway group (if you have created any). Save and apply.
You know how it goes now. You need to do the same for every existing rule in your LAN rule set.
This is how my LAN rule set looks now. Yours should look similar.
If you have created load balancer pools in pfSense, you should also go to System, Advanced, click on the "Miscellaneous" tab and tick the "Allow default gateway switching" box under "Load Balancing".
All right, time for some tweaks!
Something that is considered good practice is to also change your gateway's monitor address. What do I mean by this? Well, by default, pfSense will ping your gateway and thus decide if it's up or down. But just because you can ping it, doesn't mean you can route through it. You might be able to ping its IP address, but its external interface might be experiencing problems. So what we can do is tell pfSense to ping something on the internet instead. That's a better method.
Go to System, Routing, Gateways and click on "e" to edit them. Put a public server's address there that you know accepts ICMP requests, such as Google's public DNS server.
In this page, you can also tweak settings such as response times to reflect what you consider a bad connection in order for the failover to happen (this can be found under "Advanced").
Do the same for your other gateway.
Check to see if everything works as intended. Your gateways' status can be seen under Status, Gateways.
Done!
First of all, make sure your interfaces and gateways are set:
Now go to System, General Setup and either change the DNS servers so they reflect the ones in the corresponding networks or use public ones. You need to make sure you have at least one DNS server per gateway. In my example I use Google's DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4).
Time to create a Gateway Group. Go to System, Routing and click on the "Groups" tab. Select "+". Here we just say that we want to prefer the 192.168.150.1 gateway unless we experience packet loss or high latency, in which case we switch to 192.168.100.1.
The following comes straight from pfSense documentation. There's no better way to desribe what those options here do.
Tiers
In a gateway group, you assign each gateway to a tier to determine when it is used. The lower tier numbers are preferred. If any two gateways are on the same tier, they will load balance. If they are on different tiers, they will do failover preferring the lower tier. If the tier is set to "Never" then the gateway is not considered part of this group.Trigger Level
- Member Down
- Triggers when the monitor IP has 100% packet loss.
- Packet Loss
- Triggers only when there is packet loss to a gateway higher than its defined threshold.
- High Latency
- Triggers only when there is latency (delay) to a gateway higher than its defined threshold.
- Packet Loss or High Latency
- Triggers for either of the above conditions.
Load Balancing
When two gateways are on the same tier, they will load balance. This means that on a per-connection basis, traffic is routed over each WAN in a round-robin manner. If any gateway on the same tier goes down, it is removed from use and the other gateways on the tier continue to operate normally.Failover
When two gateways are on different tiers, the lower tier gateway(s) are preferred. If a lower tier gateway goes down, it is removed from use and the next highest tier gateway is used.Combinations
Because of the tier system, you can have any number of combinations of load balancing and failover that you like, such as One WAN that if it goes down fails to two load balancing WANs that if both go down fail to three load balancing WANs, and so on. The only limit is that there are only 5 tiers so such configurations can only go 5 levels deep.Our configuration was pretty straight-forward considering the options. We only said that we wanted to prefer the 192.168.150.1 gateway unless we experienced packet loss or high latency, in which case we switch to 192.168.100.1. Let's add another option here. If the 192.168.100.1 gateway fails, use 192.168.150.1. Better to have degraded service than no service at all, obviously.
So our configuration should now look something like this:
Honestly, just the first rule should do the trick but I have put the second one there for illustration purposes. Time to change our LAN rules so they actually use our newly configured interfaces:
Go to Firewall, Rules and click on the "LAN" tab. Edit your LAN rules. You need to go all the way down to Gateway and click on the "Advanced" button. Choose the first gateway group you created. Save and apply.
Now, in the Rules page again go to your newly edited rule and select "+", or "add a new rule based on this one". Go ahead and change the gateway to the other gateway group (if you have created any). Save and apply.
You know how it goes now. You need to do the same for every existing rule in your LAN rule set.
This is how my LAN rule set looks now. Yours should look similar.
If you have created load balancer pools in pfSense, you should also go to System, Advanced, click on the "Miscellaneous" tab and tick the "Allow default gateway switching" box under "Load Balancing".
All right, time for some tweaks!
Something that is considered good practice is to also change your gateway's monitor address. What do I mean by this? Well, by default, pfSense will ping your gateway and thus decide if it's up or down. But just because you can ping it, doesn't mean you can route through it. You might be able to ping its IP address, but its external interface might be experiencing problems. So what we can do is tell pfSense to ping something on the internet instead. That's a better method.
Go to System, Routing, Gateways and click on "e" to edit them. Put a public server's address there that you know accepts ICMP requests, such as Google's public DNS server.
In this page, you can also tweak settings such as response times to reflect what you consider a bad connection in order for the failover to happen (this can be found under "Advanced").
Do the same for your other gateway.
Check to see if everything works as intended. Your gateways' status can be seen under Status, Gateways.
Done!
