Internet Occasionally Drops for No Apparent Reason
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Good to confirm. The speed it reconnected seemed unlikely the modem could boot that fast but good to know for sure.
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@stephenw10 Looking like a cable then or possibly the BT socket as it is one of those rubbish MK4 ones!
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I doubt it's anything upstream of the modem, like the BT master socket. pfSense shows it's actually losing link on the NIC which means it's an Ethernet problem between igb0 and the modem.
It could potentially be the modem dropping the link for some reason but I have no idea why it do that deliberately.
If it has any logs it might show that or at least show it also losing the link when pfSense does.One thing you could try here is putting a switch in between pfSense and the modem so that each side is only liked to the switch. It would have to be an unmanaged switch to pass the VLAN or have the VLAN configured on a managed switch.
Another thing would be to reassign the WAN to a different port to confirm it's not a failing NIC.
Steve
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@stephenw10 said in Internet Occasionally Drops for No Apparent Reason:
I doubt it's anything upstream of the modem, like the BT master socket. pfSense shows it's actually losing link on the NIC which means it's an Ethernet problem between igb0 and the modem.
It could potentially be the modem dropping the link for some reason but I have no idea why it do that deliberately.
If it has any logs it might show that or at least show it also losing the link when pfSense does.One thing you could try here is putting a switch in between pfSense and the modem so that each side is only liked to the switch. It would have to be an unmanaged switch to pass the VLAN or have the VLAN configured on a managed switch.
Another thing would be to reassign the WAN to a different port to confirm it's not a failing NIC.
Steve
The only thing between igb0 and the modem is a patch lead (already changed). Could swap the nic cards over to confirm but they are both new.
Spent a fair bit of time last night searching for modem logs. Using Telnet I can show the logs but they are empty, no idea why.
I do have an unmanaged switch here so could put that between pfsense and the modem but xan you explain how that would help?
Steve
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Sometimes you find that two specific NIC chips will either not negotiate a link correctly or are unstable when linked. It shouldn't happen because both sides should meet the specs for Gigabit Ethernet but it can.
Putting a switch in between means that both the igb NIC and the modem are linked to the switch not to each other so at the lowest level the link negotiation/stability is different.What NICs do you have in the firewall? If you have something that isn't igb you could try using that as WAN.
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@stephenw10 Cheers for the explanation. Currently there are two 4 port NICs (both the same model) in the PC. There is another port eth0 on the motherboard, which is unused except for diagnostics etc, so I could try that one.
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Any idea what NIC that uses? eth is not a FreeBSD driver.
But just re-assigning the WAN to one of the other igb NICs would be a good test.
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@stephenw10 Not sure what NIC it uses, I will go and see if I can find out. It is on DELL Optiple 5050 SFF so should be able to determine it
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If it's recognised by pfSense you should be able to see it as an available interface.
If not it should be in the output of
pciconf -lv. -
@stephenw10 It is recognised by pfsense
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Ok, so what does pfSense recognise it as? I'm not sure what type of NICs are in that device.
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@stephenw10 It shows as :-
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I have been experiencing a similar issue despite mine doesn't drop but the Internet surfering becomes slow almost to a crawl and the logs only shows Dpinger sent to error 50. It usually happens between 1:30am - 3am, I guess the ISP updating firmware or changing IP...sometimes Dpinger doesn't recover and I need to restart the service...sometimes a reboot to recover speed. So, it's the ISP in my case.
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Ok great so it's an em(4) NIC. I would certainly test using that as WAN and see if anything changes.
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@stephenw10 will do
