Using Multiple Internet Providers with Untangle

Untangle has been my favorite Linux based network firewall and gateway system for several years. If you need to set up a gateway quickly and cheaply, you can download Untangle and throw it on just about any hardware with 2 or more network cards.

If you need advanced features like web filtering, SSL inspection, and detailed bandwidth control, you’ll need to pay for a license (as low as $50/year for home use).

Two of the advanced apps that I’ve found very useful at work recently are WAN Balancer and WAN Failover. We’ve had a lot of reliability issues with our primary internet provider, so we recently added a second connection with another company as backup.

The WAN Balancer was very easy to configure and automatically distributes traffic between multiple connections. It has worked flawlessly for several weeks now. There are situations where you might need to guarantee that specific traffic is routed through a particular provider, and that’s pretty easy to set up based on IP addresses or traffic type.

The best part, though, is combining WAN Failover with the WAN Balancer. Today, we experienced our first Internet outage with our main provider, and Untangle seamlessly started sending all of our traffic through our backup connection. It was a few hours before I even noticed that one connection was down.

Way to go Untangle, you saved the day!