MikroTik

Firstly I do apologize if this is somewhere in the forums, If it is then I missed it somewhere.

I stay in a complex where 4 of us do International Online Gaming (PC not Console). 3 of us have Landlines and the 4th has a WiFi connection to I am assuming Telkom (In South Africa). I was recently invited to a Competition in UK and before the match we practiced in what they called a Gaming pub with a Network that I would like to set up here for us in the complex. I will give as much detail as possible and would appreciate any advise or even a Push in the right direction because I am failing miserably while trying to get everything set up.

1st Landline (40Mbps Fibre) gets repeated to my Game room from my Lounge. I Hardwire this repeater into a Mikrotik 951ui 2hnd (Apparently one of the best you can find for this kind of setup unless the salesman saw me coming). I created a Bridge 2 and added ISP1 (ether2) port to it. I also created a VLAN100.

2nd Landline Again being repeater by a linksys (DDwrt). Same as above but named it Bridge 3 and added ISP2 (ether3) port to it. This was then added to VLAN200.

3rd Landline again repeater and Hardwired to Bridge 4 and added ISP3 (Ether4) to it. This was added to VLAN300.

4th is the WiFi link, which picks up and works great under quickset CPE and was placed on Bridge 1 using the WAN port and moved to VLAN400.

All 4 Bridges was given Fast Forward.

Ether 1 goes to a Netgear PoE 16 port Switch. Ether 5 goes to a Linkpro Officesmart 24port switch. and a Wifi guest network was created in case of a Cable Failure during a Game.

Everything works apart from the fact that when we all connect it does not take DATA from all the ISP's, but works mainly from the WiFi link or when i switch ports around inside the interface screen, I can get all of them to run of what ever other Ether i decide on.

I basically need to know how to set up Load balancing so that all ISP's with their respective IP Addresses will give us a larger bandwidth to run on and if there is a lag on one of the ISP's then it wont be felt during Game play.

Any advice or assistance would be appreciated.

Just keeping you guys up to date on what i have found so far. I seem to have missed several steps on my way in the actual setup of the RouterOS and now working on it step by step. My progress might even give someone else some help on a similar problem.

Using IP's just as examples

Ether 1===>192.168.44.5
Ether 2===>192.168.88.3
Ether 3===>192.168.0.3
Ether 4===>192.168.10.3
WAN1===> 192.168.50.3
Bridge1===>192.168.44.3

So the first thing that I need to create is for all 4 to communicate with each other which seems to have been my first major mistake. After some reading and head scratching I found this can be done with EoIP. Please correct me if I am wrong somewhere but if I understand it correctly I should do the following:

Ether 2 ====>192.168.88.3 ===>EoIP ===>192.168.44.3
Ether 3===>192.168.0.3 ===>EoIP ===>192.168.44.3
Ether 4===>192.168.10.3 ===>EoIP ===>192.168.44.3
WAN1===> 192.168.50.3 ===>EoIP ===>192.168.44.3

With Ether1 already in the bridge1 I will now be able to access all 4 other "networks" (Using the term loosely) from the 16port Switch that is connected to Ether1. I am assuming I need to switch on loop protection on all 4 EoIP's to prevent the repeaters from going into a signal loop.

Further Reading I found that the only place where Load Balancing is mentioned is under the CAPsMAN section in winbox. I am reading up on that so long and will update my progress as I continue.

Once again any assistance or advise would be greatly appreciated.

Major flaw in the previous post (apologies but i'm learning from my mistakes and my limited knowledge of Mikrotik is not making it easier). EoIP just work between two or more Mikrotik routers. It cannot be done (Or so Wiki says) between a port and a bridge. I am now looking into the possibility of IP routing. I should have all four AP's running in the morning then I can try with IP routing.

What I want to try and do is handle each Repeater as a "Network" since it will have it's own Unique IP range that it gets from it's AP. If I can get all the various IP ranges to point to a single port without conflicting with each other I am pretty much halfway there. there is a possibility that I might have to invest in another router to link between my 16-port switch and the Mikrotik to have a DHCP server to handle connected devices from there. I haven't been able to connect to any of the AP's with DHCP server on the Mikrotek enabled but if I can find a solution to that then the additional Router would not be needed.

If you get this working, I am very convinced it will be very problematic network and you will have a bad gaming experience.

The 4 of you should club together and a Mikrotik consultant in to assis. To pay the consultant between the 4 won't be much and you will have the correct setup

Thank you for the advice. I will take your suggestion into consideration. If I may ask, problematic in what sense? I was away for a few days, but tonight I messed around with some of the settings in the Mikrotik and found that if I set it up as a router and then work on the various ether ports I can get 3 of them them to communicate but I dont know if they are load balancing. All went well until I created the fourth bridge then the Mikrotik decide to brick. I probably did something wrong somewhere I will netinstall it again and start from scratch.

The part that I did figure out is instead of using EoIP i am using straight IPtunneling from each port to my own Repeater at home. But like I said I have no idea if there is any load balancing involved. When the one guy gets back then I will speak to them and see what they say about bringing in a professional. 90% chance we will end up just running the way we used to and the Network I saw in the Gaming Pub will be a dream never to come true. Will keep you guys up to date on how far I get and if professional assistance is called in or not.

All done and according to the test it is working and stable. Here is what I did. If you see anything wrong please correct since it is a combination of various youtube videos and allot of reading combined.

1. Mikrotik 915ui-2Hnd is cleared and flashed with latest Firmware. (Netinstall==>netboot==>keep rest button in==>select router and firmware==>flash and reboot)
2. Go straight to Interfaces without doing anything else and name your interfaces accordingly (Sounds dumb but helps allot later)
3. Assign an IP address to each port you have on a different Network / ISP
4. Create a DNS server for each port. (I battled with this because I tried to recreate the original DHCP of the router twice). So 1 DNS server per port
5. Create a Firewall Mangle for each port accessing the internet and name them according ly. (Again the naming sounds dumb but helps alot when you put it all together)
6. Create a firewall NAT for each port you want to have internet acces too. In my case it was Netgear 16 and Linkpro 24
7. Create a static route for each port
8. Check that correct pooling is done
9. Ping from each pc to internet we used 8.8.8.8 to ping to
10. Tracert to confirm each pc uses all ISP's (we again used 8.8.8.

when all port show up in the tracert then all pc's link to all the ISP's. We had one failure on the tracert where the line dropped during testing and a few seconds later it went back to the next ISP.

Gameplay is smooth and lag is acceptable. We now have an average of 42ms on international games and 3ms on local games as opposed to 245ms international and 30ms local.