[pfSense Support] Dual WAN - major problems

[Alastair Stevens]

Title: Dual WAN - major problems

Hi again

We're gradually working towards a fully redundant setup, with two pfSense boxes running with CARP and pfsync, and two WAN connections to the world.

So far, with a single main WAN connection, everything is working beautifully.  We have seamless failover between the two boxes, everything is syncing nicely, and all is well.

But when we try to bring up the secondary WAN connections, with load balancing, everything goes to pieces.  Of course, what we really want is direct WAN failover, but I know this isn't possible yet, so we're having a crack at load balancing for now.

I've read the few tutorials that cover multi-WAN setups, and they seem to give widely differing views on setting up the outbound NAT and firewall side of things.  So far, I've achieved (briefly) some sort of functioning dual WAN, and traffic flows through both WAN interfaces, but it seems very unstable.  It also seems to break the routing, such that some of the internal LAN subnets get cutoff from each other.  This is no doubt a firewall problem, but I've tried everything and can't seem to fix it.  The traffic graph also shows *massive* symmetrical traffic on the WAN interfaces on both boxes (eg 30Mbps in both directions, all the time) - what's going on there?

What I'd really value is a document/tutorial on a similar setup - ie 2 pfSense boxes with CARP/failover and 2 WANs in load-balanced mode.  Has anyone out there achieved such a setup?

Regards
Alastair