Combine Networks

Technical Support for Routers
1

I have been using a trio of B1300’s in mesh mode for the past year or so. Things have been going well with them for the most part. A few teething pains along the way but I don’t think anything out of the ordinary.

Flash forward to this week and I am trying to come up with a load balancing solution that will work. I have two providers with routers/modems of their own. This is one more than I had before. Previously, I had the WAN port of my main B1300 plugged into the Lan port of the router/modem. That had been working just fine.

In a previous conversation with support I had asked about using a LAN port as a second WAN and was told this is not possible. For this reason, I added a TP-Link TL-R605 to do load balancing. So my current setup is two router/modems plugged into two wan ports of the TP-Link modem which is in turn plugged LAN to WAN into the main B1300. This is, not surprisingly causing some issues. I tried but failed to find another solution that worked but am hoping someone has some suggestions.

I’m limited on what I can do with the router modems. Both are in DMZ mode but I can’t totally bridge them. I tried putting the TP-Link on the same network as the B1300 and joining them lan to lan. I thought I had figured out how to change the gateway on the B1300 Lan but in that setup I succeeded in cutting off internet entirely. So clearly I did not.

The TP Link does not have WIFI. Minimally I’d like to keep my mesh setup. Is there some practical way to get the B1300 and TP-Link on the same network together with the TP-Link handling load balancing/gateway duty?

I’d appreciate any direction. I’ve looked through this forum and others and I find others with similar issues but no clear solutions.

Thanks!

2 Likes
2

Seems it is difficult.

B1300 need to manage its mesh and need to work in router mode, i.e. managing its own subnet.

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On my own, I managed to get them on the same network. I.E. I turned off DHCP in the TP-Link router and let B1300 handle that. I gave TP-Link a static address on the B1300 and was able to access the TP-Link from the network, but I could not find a way to make it the internet gateway? I found a place in LUCI to change the Lan gateway but that did not work out at all.

I’m stuck trying to find a way to have multiple WAN with load balancing with my current setup… :frowning:

I would appreciate any suggestions?

4

You should have one router, connected two WAN to do load balancing. You should be able to do this using openwrt router.

The mesh router should be separate from the local balancing router. So there will be double NAT