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[Alex Atkin UK]

As titled, lost PPP on my Zen line, still in sync, but Plusnet is still working fine.

Backhaul differences with Plusnet on BTW and Zen on TTB?

[g3uiss]

Plusnet and Xen both up,here

[banger]

Uno on TTB still up.

[mofa2020]

I found this on Thinkbroadband forum,

https://forums.thinkbroadband.com/zen/t/4642467-zen-down-since-about-1300.html

[Alex Atkin UK]

Yes there didn't seem to be many of us, was just curious with it only taking one ISP offline.  I always figured if there was a fault its more likely to take them both, but I guess different backhauls does have its benefits after all.

[jelv]

Why do you think AAISP say this?

ADSL and FTTC lines can be bonded, typically A&A customers bond a BT and a TT line for greater resilience. Multiple FTTC lines can be bonded together too in the same way.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Why do you think AAISP say this?

Because AAISP support PPP bonding for the actual connection to them over Openreach.

That's rather different to trying to run two virtual circuits over IP, via two different ISPs, to the same destination IP.

The problem I believe is that when creating a tunnel over the Internet, a static route has to be created to ensure the traffic doesn't try to reroute over the tunnel itself.  That results in ONLY being able to talk to that IP address over that static route, which also specifies which WAN to use and forces all traffic to that IP address down that WAN.  As AA only have a single IP for their L2TP server, it means you can't connect over more than one ISP at the same time.

[niemand]

Not sure what you mean here. There's no static routing as far as Internet servers go and can be multiple static routes of equal cost providing multipathing.

The only time things would be problematic is if source IP of the connection when it arrives at the end server can be different addresses. In that case have to bind each IP connection to a WAN link or NAT at remote end.

I appreciate NAT is evil, etc, but it's really not. It has its uses.

[Alex Atkin UK]

I figured there must be a way to do it, but I noticed on pfSense I can't even connect to the same VPN hostname from both WANs at the same time.  Maybe I'm wrong why, but I figured it was something to do with how it sets up the static route.

[niemand]

It's kinda what I do for a living though I doubt that the costs involved would really be a big attraction to home users - the software license costs alone are going to be quite painful compared to residential broadband.

I could spin up an instance on a VPS and bond 2 Gbps worth of FTTP but struggle to come up with a business case even though it'd be relatively inexpensive as I get the licenses for free.

[niemand]

I figured there must be a way to do it, but I noticed on pfSense I can't even connect to the same VPN hostname from both WANs at the same time.  Maybe I'm wrong why, but I figured it was something to do with how it sets up the static route.

Caveat within that software. No static route there. The static routes are from the L2TP supplier back to you. The routes you have are defaults and it shouldn't be a problem having two of them with equal cost - this is how basic load balancing works. Two default routes, alternate flows between the two loading them up as you go.

Shouldn't be a big issue having two equal metric routes and multipathing, however I'm not sure of the specifics of the software. No reason within the basic protocols why you can't do it.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Caveat within that software. No static route there. The static routes are from the L2TP supplier back to you. The routes you have are defaults and it shouldn't be a problem having two of them with equal cost - this is how basic load balancing works. Two default routes, alternate flows between the two loading them up as you go.

Shouldn't be a big issue having two equal metric routes and multipathing, however I'm not sure of the specifics of the software. No reason within the basic protocols why you can't do it.

Yeah it did seem odd, as technically its exactly what its doing with the dual-WAN, so why it didn't like dual-VPN I'm not so sure.   I didn't find anything obvious in the logs, the second VPN just didn't connect.  I can only assume its a configuration error, no doubt my own lack of understanding.

Mainly though I wanted proper bonding so I can combine both WANs upload speed, paid VPNs aren't configured for that but I could set it up on my VPS if I could actually find any documentation on HOW to do it.

I actually asked on the AAISP IRC if their L2TP service supports bonding and the few people who replied seemed to think it was a terrible idea.

[niemand]

Yeah the caveats I mentioned with the data cap and speed limits come to mind.

This kinda stuff is my specialist subject though not L2TP but much smarter bonding using, usually, IPSEC over UDP.

Once I've a second service spun up I could, if inclined, spin up a VM in the cloud somewhere and use it as an Internet gateway either partially or entirely, depending on a bunch of things.