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Dual WAN

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by asalive

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Our company would like to set up a secondary internet connection for our LAN. We only have one firewall, so I am assuming that our connections would have to be set-up using a dual wan router before the firewall.

What prompted this decision by our management was an isolated incident with our current ISP where they had some sort of DNS server issue where you could get to some sites but not others (IE you could get to google, but you could not get to gmail). This became a big issue for us because among the sites we could not access was our corporate offices essentially bringing our work to a hult.

My question is, will adding a secondary WAN connection help in that scenario? What would be ?best practice? in setting up the routing? Would the LAN users simply hunt for and grab the first available internet connection? If so, with the above scenario would I run into an issue where some people are not experiencing any issues and others are? I have so many question on how this would/will work?if anyone one has any experience in dealing with this please message me so I can pick your brain or start up a discussion.

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by seanferd

but I'd think a second connection would not necessarily help with your problem. Have you tried a different internet DNS service, such as OpenDNS? http://www.opendns.com/solutions/overview/

A second internet connection would mean getting a second external IP address from the ISP, dual NIC on the firewall?, etc.

by asalive

that is what i am worried about. The firewall is not equiped to handle the dual wan, i would need to get a dual wan router infornt of the firewall. As we found out a loss of connection of any sort bring work to a halt. In that sense i am all for a backup connection. I am worried about the logistics of it all. I can program the firewall to look to the new router for the ip information, i should be able to configure the proper routes for our traffic coming in on our static IP's. IT is the outboud traffic i am worried about. I am half tempted to get the dual wan set up and route all user traffic through one side, then keep a config file handy to up switch to the back-up connection if we are facing an outtage of some sort. basically i would have one WAN set up for all "business" traffic, and the other setup for all "Other" traffic. if we had an outtage simply swap out a config file to get things back up and running.

I do not know what Open DNS is? Our DNS info come from our ISP. Is there a way to set up a different DNS address other than what is supplied?

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