Welcome to NexusFi: the best trading community on the planet, with over 150,000 members Sign Up Now for Free
Genuine reviews from real traders, not fake reviews from stealth vendors
Quality education from leading professional traders
We are a friendly, helpful, and positive community
We do not tolerate rude behavior, trolling, or vendors advertising in posts
We are here to help, just let us know what you need
You'll need to register in order to view the content of the threads and start contributing to our community. It's free for basic access, or support us by becoming an Elite Member -- see if you qualify for a discount below.
-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
(If you already have an account, login at the top of the page)
@Big Mike, after having numerous issues with my internet the last 2 weeks, even when I get things repaired I'm planning on getting a second internet connection (DSL) to go with my primary (cable), and am going to get a dual WAN router like you mention. I don't know how many real outages you have, but can you verify that with the product you have, the transfer is seamless and one won't even notice that one connection went out? In looking at a couple of brands of routers, reviewers have said that it doesn't work well as advertised, and am looking for one that will obviously achieve its purpose for me, namely to provide a backup in case of failure.
Also, TP-Link doesn't seem to make a dual-WAN wireless router--is yours wireless? I'm thinking that I could just plug my standard router into the dual WAN one, and use it for WiFi connections, if the one I get doesn't have a wireless radio.
Can you help answer these questions from other members on NexusFi?
My wireless router sets between the PC and the dual wan failover router, and then behind that is the dsl + cable.
As for seamless, in the case of say trading - you will see a disconnect followed immediately by a reconnect, as it switches from one wan port/provider/uplink to the other for your failover during a problem.
For example, if you are connected to your broker via cable modem, and you unplug the cable modem, your platform will show the disconnect and then when it tries to reconnect the dual wan router will automatically send everything via the uplink port that is still working.
Thanks very much Mike--I am having a connection problem with Kinetick such that when I get disconnected, it still shows as connected even though data is not flowing. My TT connection, on the other hand, shows a disconnect and reconnect. I have to manually disconnect and reconnect Kinetick to get data flow. I just realized based on your description of what happens that this indeed may present a problem for me in my situation. Either way, I suppose for safety I do need a second connection for the actual trading side of things--when the connection dies and I don't have an immediate flow of data for the chart, it's one thing, but when I can't modify an order at the broker, it's a much worse problem, and having the second line should provide some security for that.
If the router were to function in such a way that the program never saw the connection as being lost, that would be ideal. But according to how you're describing it, it doesn't work that way.
Yup, not possible due to the laws of the TCP/IP world we live in, sorry
I've noticed some platforms, like Sierra Chart, track by IP address. So if you log in with IP address #1 (cable modem) and then exit and re-load the app using ip address #2 (dsl), it will prevent you from loading for 5 minutes. This is an anti-piracy measure. The solution is to set your dual wan failover router to have a preferred path for certain applications or destination IP's. You could find the IP address that this anti-piracy check is occurring on for instance, and make sure it always goes over the cable modem. A preferred path is one it will always take, unless it cannot (cable down) in which case it will fail to dsl.
Whereas in a true load balanced setup, it will take the path of least resistance (lowest latency, lowest utilization) when first establishing a new TCP connection.
An example:
- You go to bighugefilesdownloadsite.com (fake)
- They use a content distribution network to host their files, so when you try to download a file, it is coming from any number of servers world wide (different IP's)
- You click on hugefile #1 to download -> router chooses DSL
- Your DSL connection is now not so fast anymore
- You click immediately on big huge file #2 to download while #1 is still going -> router chooses cable this time
- It chose cable because it measures the utilization and latency, and cable was better
In above, each new download is a new TCP connection. But in the world of say trading, IQFeed will have a single TCP connection to the uplink server, just as say TradingTechnologies or Rithmic or whatever execution you are using will. It won't switch back and forth like it would for a website download, because each connection is opened and then kept open.
Last, the router is smart enough that if it opens a TCP connection to an IP address over port #1 (cable), and another new TCP connection request to the same destination IP is initiated, it will re-use port #1 (cable) again. This works well in the "real world" so as to not confuse to many server-side things on the other end. In other words, packets to/from the same destination (IP) will go over the same port.