[Guide - WIP]WAN failover to mobile hotspot

[norgan]

Hi All,

Thought I'd share this config that I had struggled with for a few weeks. Something that OPNsense has finally provided a solution for.

The use case:
You have an internet connection, you have a fancy mobile phone with a super-fast 4g or 5g network. You are already paying for a bunch of data and live service. Why not just use that if your primary link goes down instead of paying for another service with separate data and monthly cost, only to be used on a handful of occasions throughout the year.

The solution:

Configure the wireless interface on your hardware hosting opnsense (and assume this also works on pfsense?).

Essentially, if you assign the wireless interface to the wan declaration in opnsense, it puts it into client mode and you can configure the interface to just connect to the access point, in this case, your phone's hotspot function, and use it as an upstream provider of internet connectivity.

All you need to do is turn on your hotspot and opnsense will connect to it and show it as a live gateway. 

How is it done:

WIP - sorry, I am working on the details for you. I will provide links to guides i used and the stuff I had to figure out. I will come back and put some details in. If you are interested let me know and i'll see what I can do to get info to you. Also, let me know if you found somewhere that showed how to do this, I wasn't able to find a concise guide for this particular use case.

[hidef]

Well....?
I'm waiting.

I did find this:
https://brendonmatheson.com/2020/08/07/wan-failover-to-4G-with-pfsense.html

I'm likely going to set this up as well.  Doesn't look hard but I have to find my wireless antennas first!
--------------------
UPDATE
Good luck!  I never got mine to connect properly.  Getting an IPV4 add from my phone was a complete failure and I was able to get IPV6 going and connected but something was VERY wrong.  Then I disabled IPV6 and OPNsense could never figure it out and continued to show ipv6 addresses - I got an IPV4 ONLY when I enabled IPV6 and that was SPOTTY.  It ruined my LTE connection on my phone until the carrier refreshed it. 

It did *not* go well...  Maybe its an iphone thing?  I dunno.  Not even CLOSE to getting the failover part going.

[hidef]

Is this literally a 12 year old bug?

https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=132722

[m4rtin]

Hallo,

is there an update? I'm also interested in this usecase!

[vico1959]

I know this is an old thread but I just wanted to say that I had a configuration like this working a couple of years ago. I was not using a phone but it was a cellular wireless hotspot and it did work in case anyone is still wondering.  Unfortunately, it has been too long and too many configurations ago so I don't remember specific instructions on how I did it but it is possible.