RV320 need to prefer WAN1, but route to both WAN's

[Rasmus Rask]

I have two WAN connections: A dedicated 48/24 Mbit over cable (WAN1) and a residental shared 300/300 Mbit (WAN2), which I help managing.

I have some services (TV & music) provided by the cable company that requires me to come from my cable connection, so I always want outbound connections to go out of WAN1, with the only exception being, if it's down.

But I also need to be able to route to the specific subnet on WAN2, which is directly known by the RV320, to administrate the residental router on that subnet.

However...

• If I use Load Balance, outbound connections are load balanced between WAN's (obviously), which causes the cable service to only work randomly
• Protocol binding on WAN ports is useless, as it requires me to specify specific ports AND destination IP addresses, with no option to use wildcards
• Switching to from Load Balance to Smart Link Backup, selecting WAN1 as the primary, casues WAN2 to become completely inactive, until WAN1 goes down. Why on earth wouldn't you want the router to still know about WAN2, and be able to route to its subnet?
• I've also tried specifically adding a static route to the WAN2 subnet, so the router would know to go out of the WAN2 interface, but it still doesn't work, if the interface is inactive

It sounded like a simple task to me and was exactly what I bought the RV320 for, but I simply can't figure out how to make this work.

Any help, please? Thanks!

[SamirD · Accepted solution]

Protocol binding seems like it would be best to handle this, I think.  You can specify 0.0.0.0 for all IPs and you can add a new service with whatever port range you want for ports.

I recall a way to set certain IP ranges to certain wan ports on my rv016.  Is there an option like that on the rv320?  This option seems like it would solve your problem.    

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[Rasmus Rask]

Thanks for your reply, Samir.

Well, I couldn't use 0.0.0.0 (at least for source start).

I created two protocol bindings, both using the "All Traffic" standard service, and having a source IP range of my LAN network range.

First rule specified the residental network as the destination, which is only connected to WAN2, which I of course linked to WAN2.

For the second rule, I specified 0.0.0.0-255.255.255.255, linking it to WAN1.

It seems to do what I want - always use WAN1 for outbound connections, but still failover to WAN2, if WAN1 goes down.

Thanks!

[SamirD]

Sweet!  Glad I was able to be of some help.

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[Rasmus Rask]

Hi again,

I'm getting a bit tired of this router...

While your suggestion generally works, the connection to the network attached to WAN2 is unstable and experience frequent drop-outs. 

This is particular evident when connecting via RDP to a virtual machine on the network, or use VMWare vSphere Client to manage the host, both requiring a continuos connection.

Seems like a bug to me - any chance of getting a fix for this, Cisco?

This, and other bugs, pretty much renders my expensive home router useless, for the purpose it was bought for :(

[SamirD]

Are the dropouts on WAN2 because of the WAN connection or the rv320? If it's because of the rv320, here's what I would try--different firmwares. Each firmware has its own set of bugs, and at the same time other features work fine. If this feature is acting buggy on whatever firmware you're on, try a different version--and don't be afraid to use a 'lower' version. If it works, I typically don't care what version it is. ;)

[Rasmus Rask]

I'm sorry to say, but I have tried three different versions - from the current as of now and the last two versions. Same issue.

Also, site-to-site VPN is unstable to a degree where's it's utterly unusable, but that's a topic for a different thread.

I'm very disappointed with this router and my RV220W, and I honestly don't know why Cisco but their brand on them, when they're so far from Cisco quality.