Hi Everyone,
This is my first post, and while I have a lot of experience with other consumer routers and firmware (ddrt, merlin, tomato, netgear, asus, etc.), I am new to OPNSense and I am by far not a network expert. Thank you for your patience.
After getting OPNSense working well on my home network, I decided after a few days of dropouts from AT&T Fiber, that I needed a failover. I did a little homework and I decided, as others did, on the LM1200 Cellular 4G LTE modem for the task.
I followed the documentation, saw some videos and after some trial and error, I finally got the failover working. I chose to put the failover gateway on a LAN interface so I can easily configure the LM1200 over the web interface if need be, but I also got the failover working by using an open ethernet port on the OPNSense machine itself, assigning a secondary WAN to the new interface and putting the gateway on the interface/wan instead.
In the first case, I simply had to connect the LM1200 to my router switch. I preferred this method because I could keep the LAN interface on the same subnet that sits outside of the DHCP space and I can get at the web interface of the LM1200. I could not get the second option to work correctly unless I set the failover gateway on a different subnet. This made it so I could not access the web interface of the LM1200 which is not a big deal, but not preferable. I don't think one method worked better than the other. I simply liked the idea of being able to get to the LM1200 via the web interface. I think I could have gotten the web interface working in the case where I used the extra ethernet port on the OPNSense machine, but I got tripped up on static routing, etc. so I decided to not over complicate the setup.
Sorry about the long winded set-up, but I wanted to make sure I gave the right background for my question.
The problem I have now is that even when the failover is not being utilized (supposedly no clients connected), I still see activity on the LM1200. This is causing me to use up my cellular data very quickly. At first I thought maybe the usage had to do with the gateway being monitored, but I turned off monitoring to try to save on utilizing the data to no avail. Obviously, the failover setup will not be useful if there is no data left when it needs to be utilized. Is there a setting I missed? Is it normal for the LM1200 to utilize GBs of data while monitoring the gateway? Is there something wrong in the in the switch?
Any help is appreciated.
Thanks
Jose