Firewalla: Fine-Tune Your Traffic With Routes, VPN Connections, and Multi-WAN Features Newsletter - May 24, 2023

Fine-Tune Your Traffic With Policy-Based Routes

Firewalla Policy-Based Routing (PBR) is a powerful feature that allows you to manage how your traffic travels across your network. When PBR is integrated with VPN and Multi-WAN features, it's a very effective tool for fully controlling your network traffic.

Using Routes with Third-Party VPNs and Multi-WAN features

With Routes, you can selectively direct your traffic over any interface, including Third-Party VPNs and any WAN (if you have a multi-WAN setup). This allows you to easily create complex configurations like:

• Routing all video streaming traffic to a Third-Party VPN
• Directing work traffic to a VPN and personal traffic to your WAN
• Connecting to your Third-Party VPN when you're away from home
• Routing video conferencing over a better-performing WAN

And much more – there are endless ways to use Routes to fine-tune your network.

Routing traffic to a Third-Party VPN

Firewalla's VPN Client feature connects any device— or even your entire local network— to a VPN server. Using VPN Client with Routes allows you to selectively direct different types of traffic to use or not use your VPN. For example, you can direct all video streaming traffic from all your devices over your VPN. Tap on Routes on your box's main page and create a new Route:

• Matching: choose from Target List, Domain, IP Address, IP Range, Remote Port, Region, Internet, Gaming, Social, or Video. To block all video sites, select Video.
• On: choose what devices or groups you want to be included on this Route.
• Interface: choose your Third-Party VPN.
• Route Preference: select either Static, which drops the traffic if the selected interface is not available; or Preferred, which allows the traffic through an alternate route if the selected interface is not available.

With this Route, all video traffic for all devices on the network will go through your VPN.

Routing specific domains over a VPN

In some cases, you may only want certain domains to go to a VPN connection. For example, you might want to send work-related communications over VPN but keep the rest of your traffic on your WAN or a different VPN.

You can use PBR to easily send traffic to specific domains to your VPN connection. Create a new Route:

• Matching: set your company domain.
• On: choose the devices or groups you want to be included.
• Interface: choose your work VPN.
• Route Preference: choose between Static or Preferred.

With this Route, all traffic to your work domain will go through your VPN. If you have multiple work-related domains, you can create a Target List to group them together and make a single Route for all your work-related domains.

Connecting to your Third-Party VPN remotely

You use both Firewalla's VPN Server and VPN Client to connect your devices to a Third-Party VPN even when you're away from your local network. To do this, you'll create two VPN connections:

1. A VPN from your device to your home.
2. A VPN from your home to a Third-Party VPN.

After setting up the Firewalla VPN Server, create a new Route:

• Matching: Internet Traffic
• On: select your VPN Server (the VPN network you're VPN-ing into)
• Interface: select your VPN Client (your Third-Party VPN)
• Route Preference: choose between Static or Preferred

Routing traffic over a specific WAN

Multi-WAN setups are when users have more than one WAN connection for redundancy and increased throughput. This is a powerful feature, but Routes can help enhance it. For example, Routes enables you to exclusively route video conferencing over a better-performing WAN to ensure the best possible quality and reliability.

To do this, create a new Route:

• Matching: set the domain of your video conferencing platform.
• On: choose the devices or groups you want to be included.
• Interface: choose your better-performing WAN.
• Route Preference: choose between Static or Preferred.

With this Route, all your video conferencing will go over your better WAN. Routes make it easy to control which network specific types of traffic travel on, keeping applications on your network performing at their best.

This is part of our Firewalla Weekly Newsletter. You can sign up here https://firewalla.com/weekly.