Disclaimer: My networking experience is limitied, so apologies if I'm using the wrong terms.
We are a small business (7 staff). We have two connections to the internet, using two separate modems. What we'd like to do is configure our network connection to automatically failover to the second connection if the primary connection is down.
We have two Microsoft Windows DNS servers. Both of these have two Default Gateways configured on their network interface, pointing to each of our modems. My hope was that this would be enough to allow failover, but doesn't seem to be the case.
I believe there are modems available that support two connections. I don't think this is an option for us, as our two connections are using very different technology.
I have found a product called ng-firewall that seems to provide these options, however, my understanding is that we would need to configure all computers to run a firewall client, which isn't ideal. I would like this to be automatically handled without requiring changes to computers connected.
We have a D-Link web smart switch, but I'm not sure if this has any features that can help here.
Best Answer
The simplest answer: get a firewall that can support multiple WAN interfaces with failover and let it handle it for you. It would be a good business practice to have a firewall in front of everything anyway.
I know personally the
SonicWall NSA seriesdoes this and I think theSonicWall TZ seriesdoes also. The TZ series can be had for under $1,000.The DNS servers would just need to point to the firewall as the default gateway and then the firewall will handle the routing. The workstations would use the firewall as the default gateway. This simplifies everything as well as you would not have to change your network information on workstations every time you change internet service providers.
Here is what it would look like.