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    Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • G
      Gblenn @RickyBaker
      last edited by

      @RickyBaker It's under Settings - Networks.
      Simplest way to find it, at least in the new UI, is to click Settings and type in the search field at the top...

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        RickyBaker @Gblenn
        last edited by

        @Gblenn great suggestion! this is what i found though:
        9dc42451-9dcc-4760-b15e-fb757c1a157a-image.png

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        • B
          bp81 @RickyBaker
          last edited by

          @RickyBaker said in Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect:

          @Gblenn great suggestion! this is what i found though:
          9dc42451-9dcc-4760-b15e-fb757c1a157a-image.png

          You could try setting Spanning Tree Protocol to Disabled.

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          • stephenw10S
            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
            last edited by

            Hmm, I would expect disabling STP to be more likely to create/allow loops.

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              RickyBaker @stephenw10
              last edited by

              @stephenw10 yeah same. No errors in the log now that I have unplugged the SFP+ cable that was a redundant connection to my unRAID...

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                RickyBaker @RickyBaker
                last edited by

                @RickyBaker Anyone have any suggestions for logs i can pull to try to isolate the problem? My wife is getting pretty mad at me:)

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                • johnpozJ
                  johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @RickyBaker
                  last edited by johnpoz

                  @RickyBaker I thought your problem went away when you pulled your 2nd connection to your nas.

                  now that I have unplugged the SFP+ cable that was a redundant connection to my unRAID...

                  If one device connects and takes out your whole network - they are either creating a loop storm with traffic they are sending out, or are the loop or they are stepping on an IP.. Or they are just spewing so much garbage that even without a loop its causing you problems.

                  Have you just done a basic sniff with something on the network - wireshark, tcpdump - get a baseline when your network is working.. Now connect the device that causes you problems.. Any sort of storm will be obvious..

                  I had a nic go bad one time - that was just spewing garbage on the line.. I mean its rare that a nic would fail like that.. But can happen..

                  An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                  If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                  Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                  SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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                    RickyBaker @johnpoz
                    last edited by

                    @johnpoz i have not, i find wireshark intimidating, but I did download it last time I had a problem and was able to get the troubleshooting i needed. I'll do the same. The offending device is back no longer available to me. My parents went back home, but the internet is still very slow to load pretty much any webpage (with the speedtest being fine...once the website loads).

                    I'll try to do a basic sniff tonight

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                    • R
                      RickyBaker @johnpoz
                      last edited by

                      @johnpoz said in Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect:

                      I thought your problem went away when you pulled your 2nd connection to your nas.

                      No, there was no noticeable improvement in internet quality, but the error of 2 devices trying to use the same IP address disappeared from the Unifi system logs.

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                      • johnpozJ
                        johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator @RickyBaker
                        last edited by johnpoz

                        @RickyBaker well you prob had duplicate IP on your nas.. Or your offending device was stepping on one of the nas IPs. But if your unless your dns or pfsense is running on your unraid box.. That should have zero to do with normal internet access.

                        Do a simple dns query for something.. I like to use dig but nslookup works too.. nslookup is better if you set debug

                        Normally clients just ask pfsense IP for dns, and then unbound on dns resolves it - are you doing anything different than out of the box default in your unbound settings?

                        Do you have it set to register dhcp - if you have lots of dhcp traffic this can cause restarts.. If it is doing that every few minutes or seconds than yeah your going to have horrible dns..

                        An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                        If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                        Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                        SG-4860 24.11 | Lab VMs 2.8, 24.11

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                          RickyBaker @johnpoz
                          last edited by

                          @johnpoz said in Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect:

                          Normally clients just ask pfsense IP for dns, and then unbound on dns resolves it - are you doing anything different than out of the box default in your unbound settings?

                          ahhh shoot I never saw your response and was hacking it by myself. We did something similar to this is a previous thread about DNS resolver that we resolved by adding "do-ip6:no" to the advanced settings. I remember being very out of my depth with nslookup and dig but I'll go back to the thread and retrace those steps. In the meantime here's a bunch of my DNSResolver log if there's any obvious clues in there.

                          https://pastebin.com/KRurBaVt

                          I just did a hard reset on all the equipment and it seems to have had no affect. The interent, and specifically pulling up webpages seems slow a LOT of the time but not ALL the time. And sometimes it completely locks up, I get err_time outs from browser. and curiously since i'm looking at my Google Hub Max, that will spin with a "Connecting" graphic and after a few seconds everything will work again for a few minutes before it happens again. If I click on an article in the Google feed on my phone, it will, usually, eventually show up but can take up to 10 seconds or so.

                          I'll work on other NSlookup dig stuff, but if you have any ideas that would be very appreciated.

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                            RickyBaker @RickyBaker
                            last edited by

                            Well i found something def not good while trouble shooting something unrelated...

                            c61303c9-76aa-42ee-92a3-d5eeed38b0c4-image.png

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                            • stephenw10S
                              stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                              last edited by

                              Yeah, that's definitely not good! 😬

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                              • M
                                michmoor LAYER 8 Rebel Alliance @RickyBaker
                                last edited by

                                @RickyBaker You sure its unrelated?

                                Firewall: NetGate,Palo Alto-VM,Juniper SRX
                                Routing: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
                                Switching: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
                                Wireless: Unifi, Aruba IAP
                                JNCIP,CCNP Enterprise

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                                • stephenw10S
                                  stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                  last edited by

                                  The think he was investigating when he found it was unrelated but it sure seems related to this! 😉

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                                    michmoor LAYER 8 Rebel Alliance @stephenw10
                                    last edited by

                                    @stephenw10 yep yep that’s why I asked 🤔
                                    layer2 loops point to a bigger issue

                                    Firewall: NetGate,Palo Alto-VM,Juniper SRX
                                    Routing: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
                                    Switching: Juniper, Arista, Cisco
                                    Wireless: Unifi, Aruba IAP
                                    JNCIP,CCNP Enterprise

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                                      RickyBaker @michmoor
                                      last edited by

                                      @michmoor not 100% sure it's unrelated. I have static IP's assigned to all the AP's and never an issue, so something "not good" is happening that I don't understand. However I unplugged the offending port and still experiencing very slow load times (if at all). Also feels like the STP should have affectively taken care of it if that was the issue (effectively turning it off) the AP was in MESH mode anyways. I'll report when I figure something out...

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                                      • stephenw10S
                                        stephenw10 Netgate Administrator @RickyBaker
                                        last edited by stephenw10

                                        @RickyBaker said in Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect:

                                        AP was in MESH mode

                                        Hmm, that could create a loop.

                                        Or at least end up routing traffic poorly. I would always avoid WiFi mesh if at all possible.

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                                          RickyBaker @stephenw10
                                          last edited by

                                          @stephenw10 I understand that theory but I just assumed that when the port was shut off to network traffic (but still sending power) it simply switched from broadcasting a full signal to simply repeating a nearby signal. Perhaps this is an inaccurate assumption.

                                          Haven't found the source of anything yet but there's something colliding/suboptimal going on here
                                          7f0f1141-d991-42ea-9ca4-e1cb9a09c241-image.png

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                                          • stephenw10S
                                            stephenw10 Netgate Administrator
                                            last edited by

                                            It could behave like that but Mesh can be tricky! I have seen it do weird stuff with some vendors. Like for example prefer using multiple wireless hops when a local wired connection was available resulting in terrible throughput.

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