Does anyone have any first/second hand experience running Everquest over dual internet connections with a Dual WAN router? That is the EQ keeps running even when one internet connection goes down. It has been the dream of mine for many years, a perfect connection to Everquest all the time. I have two ISPs both unreliable, liable to fail at least once a day with much cursing to be followed soon after... However, they do not fail at the same time, thus dual WAN router seems perfect for playing EQ. So either failover or load balancing mode would be fine for playing Everquest although load balancing should be faster most of the time. The question is would the switching between the different external IPs not cause Everquest to drop the connection to the EQ thus completely destroying the point of a dual Wan router with Everquest? The best information on someone's experiences with dual Wan I have found here: https://forums.thesecretworld.com/archive/index.php?t-60354.html There some user complains that another MMO the Secret World fails for him, while WOW, EQ, EQ2 do work with a dual band router. I can't find any other information and those routers are quite pricy to take the plunge. I am considering devices such as: Linksys Dual WAN Gigabit VPN Router (LRT224) Peplink Balance 20 Dual-WAN Router Anyone have any experiences with two internet connections and EQ? DSL + cable + 3G/4G etc?
The issue your going to have is as the guy said in the link, your two isp's will have different internet address and when the one your on dies your going to get disconnected. Now the only solution that I am aware of, for a game such as EQ, would be for you to find a service that would allow many input connections to be routed to a single connection (eq server) presenting a single IP address to eq. Good luck on your endeavor. IF your desperate AND you have some money you could look at a Cloud Computer from Amazon, Google etc. They may be able to accomplish your goal.
Well, Cloud computer(ie VPS) would be no good for playing EQ (for one DBG frowns on VMs and second the latency would kill me). The question is how to accomplish the task of getting a single external IP(public IP) while using two internet connections. The thing is that according to that forum post EQ doesn't really mind the switching of the IPs so it "should" work. I just do not want to spend $200-300 on a router to find out there is no improvement.
I have used this type of router before as I do support for high net worth individuals. Specifically I used a multi-wan router on a private jet for internet connectivity when the jet was taxiing and the satellite internet was not available due to FAA restrictions. The router used dual EVDO cards with different cell networks cards. The multi-wan router feeds were attached to a second switch which provided internet connectivity to the wireless access points on the plane, satellite preferred, cellular only when disabled configuration. You don't need the router to test whether this type of hardware would work for EQ. You just need two ethernet cards on your machine, one card connected to router A the other card connected to router B. Check that both cards have IP addresses and can access the internet. Then: Connect to EQ: Disable Ethernet card connected to A: Did your EQ connection stay up? Enable Card A Disable Card B: Did your connection stay up? If it dropped at any point then your multi-wan router won't do diddly. This idea of two ISP's giving your various connections the same IP, that's not going to happen it isn't the way TCP/IP addressing works. How can you solve this problem? You would need to put a server up at a third location which has reliable internet connectivity and route all traffic to/from EQ from both of your connections through that, before it is sent on to EQ. This way when one of the two connections go down, your external IP as seen by EQ does not change. It will create latency but it is doable, something in the region of 40-50ms. This is what many people do for systems which are location aware/restricted (NFL games, region restricted video games. etc.) commercial services exist which do this, I've done it for clients before as well. However considering you are sweating the $300 of the router, I doubt there is much chance you want to hire out to get it done.
Thanks guys again for the advice. I guess I will stick with a regular single ISP connection. It is not that crucial if EQ fails in the middle of a raid..
