I 've talked before about the Hawking Technology Blackhawk FR24 Dual WAN firewall router. The intent of this box is to route two incoming broadband connections to one network. The reason for two connections is to act either as a backup, or if the connections are from the same ISP, split the load across two pipes.
As you may remember, I had problems getting the second connection to automatically come online. But recently, Dr. Pournelle's Byte column talked about how he was able to do this very thing with his FR24 (I wonder where he heard of it).
I figured if it works for him there must be a way of getting it to work for me. So I decided to do some experimenting. But first, the problem I seemed to have was with the DHCP of the FR24. If I manually released the IP addresses it would switch to the backup input. But what I wanted was the FR24 to switch automatically.
I reckoned if I tried changing over to using static internal IP address this might solve the problem. So I manually assigned addresses to the three PCs we have at the Seto Shack, disabled the DHCP in the FR24, noted in the FR24 that these were addresses to let through, rebooted everything, including the FR24, and Bob's your uncle, it worked!
Now, anythime the primary connection fails, the secondary automatically comes online (the FR24 checks the connections about every 30 seconds so it takes about that long for the change over to occur).
Life is sweet.
Tomorrow is an US holiday (Independence Day) so I will not have a post up. I hope you have a safe, but Great Weekend Everyone - Aloha!
