Internet Lines
The WAN tab on the Internet page is where the cafe's lines live. A cafe with one line sets it once and never comes back. A cafe that cannot afford to be offline adds a second.
Adding a line
Each line needs a network card of its own on the gateway PC and one of three ways of getting an address:
- Automatic. The modem hands out the address. This is what most cafes have, and it needs nothing else from you.
- Fixed address. Your provider gave you an address, a subnet and a gateway to type in.
- PPPoE. Your provider gave you a username and a password. Common on DSL lines where the modem is in bridge mode.
Give each line a monitoring address if you want the gateway to watch it closely. The gateway pings it to decide whether the line is really up, not just plugged in.
Order of preference
Every line has a place in the order, where 1 is the one you want used. The gateway watches each line and uses the best one available: when the first goes down traffic moves to the next, and moves back when it recovers.
Lines at the same level do not split traffic evenly between them. Read the order as "use this one, and if it is gone use that one". A cafe with fibre and a mobile backup puts fibre at 1 and the backup at 2, and the backup sits idle until the day it is needed.
Sending a device out through a chosen line
A named device can be pinned to a line. The usual reasons:
- A console or a streaming station that should stay on the fast line even when it is busy.
- A till or an office PC that needs the address the second line carries.
The pinning follows the device, not the station it happens to be sitting at. See Devices and speed for how devices are named and grouped.
When a line drops
The Overview tab shows which line is carrying traffic right now and how long it has been. A line that went down and came back leaves a mark there, which is what to look at when a customer says the internet "went weird earlier".
Nothing on the cafe side has to be restarted when a line changes. Sessions carry on, and most downloads survive it.
What it cannot do
- It does not add up the speed of two lines. One line carries the traffic at a time.
- It does not split one download across both.
- A line that is plugged in but answering nothing can still look up to the gateway if it has no monitoring address to test against. Give a backup line one.