Status Board incorrectly reporting issues with Gateway

gms

Hey folks,

so, first install, in production:
Everything goes amazingly smooth, but:
I configured the dashboard to contain also the information about the gateway and I receive a package loss notice:

Interfaces show as follows:
WAN1 Uptime: 01:31:55 2.36.236.23
LAN autoselect 10.0.0.1
DMZ autoselect 172.16.0.1
WAN2 Uptime: 00:04:53 79.45.164.204

Gateways instead:
Name RTT RTTsd Loss Status
WAN1_PPPOE
X.X.X.X 1.0ms 0.1ms 0.0% Online
WAN2_PPPOE
X.X.X.X 0.0ms 0.0ms 100% Offline, Packetloss

The fun part is that I get stellar connection. I think the problem lies that the dashboard is a little impatient and does not update properly when the connection is restored.

viragomann

@gms
The gateway status is determined by pinging it (by default) or a stated monitoring IP periodically. The default ping interface is a half second.

So if the gateway is shown up as offline, but works well it most probably doesn't respond to ping requests.

You can state an alternative IP in the internet for the monitoring in the gateway settings to get a proper status.
pfSense automatically set a route then to direct packets to this IP over the respective gateway.

mer

@viragomann said in Status Board incorrectly reporting issues with Gateway:

So if the gateway is shown up as offline, but works well it most probably doesn't respond to ping requests.

Yep this is very likely the issue.
Comcast does this; if you get an IP, the next hop router/default gateway is the default IP for the gateway, but it doesn't respond to pings so pfSense reports as down.
Just reconfigure to have the "monitor" address to be something upstream, like the Comcast DNS servers. That will prove "my cable modem is up, I can reach into the ISP network".

gms

@viragomann @mer thanks folks, that was in fact the case.