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My Weird Prompts · Monday · 20 min

Multi-WAN Beyond Failover: OPNsense vs OpenWrt

You've built the gateway group, set the tiers, and failover works. So why does a dropped link still kill your VPN, your game, and your VoIP call? This episode separates true bonding from load balancing, then walks through what the "advanced" version of multi-WAN actually looks like in open source. In OPNsense, that means gateway group tiers, trigger levels, weight-based distribution, sticky connections, and the one silent subnet-mask mistake that breaks per-device routing. On the OpenWrt side, it means mwan3's firewall-mark packet classification, the iptables-to-nftables transition, and a five-hundred-line Lua alternative called Mini-MWAN that does failover and nothing else. Along the way: why failover speed was never the bottleneck, why the public IP change is the real problem, and why people who've done load balancing properly still go looking at bonding. Key sources: • OPNsense docs, gateway groups/multi-WAN — https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/multiwan.html • OPNsense docs, Multi WAN how-to (sticky, weight, failover states) — https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/multiwan.html • mwan3 nftables port, v3.6.12 (2026-08-11) — https://github.com/dl12345/mwan3 Episode 5904 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5904 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/719827)

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You've built the gateway group, set the tiers, and failover works. So why does a dropped link still kill your VPN, your game, and your VoIP call? This episode separates true bonding from load balancing, then walks through what the "advanced" version of multi-WAN actually looks like in open source. In OPNsense, that means gateway group tiers, trigger levels, weight-based distribution, sticky connections, and the one silent subnet-mask mistake that breaks per-device routing. On the OpenWrt side, it means mwan3's firewall-mark packet classification, the iptables-to-nftables transition, and a five-hundred-line Lua alternative called Mini-MWAN that does failover and nothing else. Along the way: why failover speed was never the bottleneck, why the public IP change is the real problem, and why people who've done load balancing properly still go looking at bonding.

Key sources:
• OPNsense docs, gateway groups/multi-WAN — https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/multiwan.html
• OPNsense docs, Multi WAN how-to (sticky, weight, failover states) — https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/multiwan.html
• mwan3 nftables port, v3.6.12 (2026-08-11) — https://github.com/dl12345/mwan3

Episode 5904 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5904 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/719827)

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