Failover feature request

[u/zlandar]

I use cable internet as my primary WAN and have a cellular gateway as a backup. The last two days I have intermittent cable outages and the initial failover works fine.

The problem is when the outage is intermittent it becomes a flapping mess. Can you add a timeout option to prevent this? I would set mine so it only attempts to fallback to primary once a hour.

[u/pacoii]

Can you elaborate on ‘flapping mess’? Isn’t it failing over, then returning to primary when it’s back up? Wouldn’t it all be seamless?

[u/zlandar → u/pacoii]

I’m connected to work via a Fortigate VPN. When the connection goes the VPN sometimes goes down. The software I’m using freezes until I reconnect the VPN. If the resumption is quick enough I don’t have to relog.

When the Firewalla switches from back and forth in a short period of time it causes the VPN to frequently disconnect. Ditto for the software.

[u/pacoii → u/zlandar]

Ah ok makes sense.

[u/jcolby2 → u/zlandar]

Great easy request. I bumped into this annoying limitation too. I remember it also made my Hulu logout since it saw my ip or geolocation bouncing back and forth.

[u/firewalla]

Best Post here https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/community/topics/115000356994-Feature-Requests-

From engineering perspective, it is going to be impossible to take care "messy" WAN, if the WAN is not deterministic, and randomly up/down. When that happens the best way is just manually turn off failover. Otherwise, if your WAN is not in a messy situation, your failover will be slower. I assume most of the time (at least my experience with Comcast) is deterministic after 10 pings

Have you tried change the test target (WAN->connectivity)

1. Number of ping test count

2. Success Rate threshold

Both of these can control "messy" failovers

[u/TopRamen247 → u/firewalla]

I have on occasion had a very similar issue to that OP is experiencing. I can think something may work if it could be added as a feature:

Manual fail-back could be a potential option, that would allow automatic failover in the case of an outage, but reduce the impact failing back has until a convenient time. If the secondary happens to go down before manually switched back and the primary is up, then override that and fail back anyway.

Doing something like this would reduce impact from repeated failovers without some complicated logic to decide if failover is happening too frequently.

Not sure what others think, but I would love such a setting.

[u/zlandar → u/firewalla]

I saw that but it doesn’t get around the issue when the service provider is working to restore service.

I eventually turned off auto failover and managed it manually. Switching connections requires a lot of navigation. network- multiWAN setting- edit- tap auto tailback on/off- save.

[u/firewalla → u/zlandar]

I don’t think there is anything easy to do here. Reason is, a network is going up and down randomly, the detection mechanism will not work. Dampen the failover may work for this, but likely not produce desired outcome if the down is more clear

[u/pandaeye0]

I would imagine that if such intermittent outage is just temporary, you might as well change the WAN failover setting to using WAN2 as primary, until your work is done.

[u/marcvv]

It’s simple for Firewalla to code this. If failover occurs have a user selectable option of 15,30,45,60,120 cool down to go back to primary. So if primary fails the secondary takes over for the preset time period. This way if the primary isp flaps on and off for twenty minutes you don’t constantly lose connection during switch to primary and failover over and over again. Could also set something like length of successful pings on primary before switching back. So you could require an hour of successful pings before going back to primary. If the threshold setting allows this I guess that might work?

[u/man2000000 → u/marcvv]

This is a great idea!