Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect
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@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..
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@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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@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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@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..
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@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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Well i found something def not good while trouble shooting something unrelated...
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Yeah, that's definitely not good!
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@RickyBaker You sure its unrelated?
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The think he was investigating when he found it was unrelated but it sure seems related to this!
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@stephenw10 yep yep that’s why I asked
layer2 loops point to a bigger issue -
@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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@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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@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
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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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@stephenw10 STP should have effectively turned off the port anyways, though i suppose crazy Mesh activity might have still caused problems, sure, but i'm still experiencing issues and the ethernet cord to the offending AP is completely unplugged (not to mention my VSSL zone audio amplifier/streamer and Home Assistant RPi are also unplugged...)
I guess i need some good data from wireshark, i'll try for that tonight.
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@RickyBaker personally I would simplify (wired only single path), then slowly rebuild.
Having dual paths, relying devices to block it and then expecting optimal throughput is overly optimistic imo.
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@RickyBaker How many AP's and what channels are you using?
You will run into trouble if you reuse channels on adjacent AP's, giving a ton of interference. Also, with as many 14 clients that you have on one channel 2.4Ghz, I'm not surprised you see all those retries. -
@Patch said in Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect:
@RickyBaker personally I would simplify (wired only single path), then slowly rebuild.
Do you mean just one AP at first? not devices? I'm not sure how to kick everything off....would essentially be easier to just start over from scratch (shudder).
@Gblenn said in Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect:
@RickyBaker How many AP's and what channels are you using?
6 AP's i'm not sure about channel but I can check later today. I plan on doing extensive testing on my only wired desktop.
I also fired up Wireshark before I left for work...I don't have much experience with it, can anybody suggest what I should be doing with it when I get home? what to look for? Any tutorial on using it to troubleshoot an issue such as mine?
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@RickyBaker said in Network becomes totally unusable when my parents connect:
6 AP's i'm not sure about channel but I can check later today. I plan on doing extensive testing on my only wired desktop.
Ok, so with that many AP's I'm guessing we are talking about quite an area to cover? Several floors perhaps?
I think you need to do some radio planning...If you have an Android device there are plenty of apps that will help you map out what channels are in use, and to some extent how much they are used. Unifi has an App that is quite good called WiFiman (probably available on iOS as well, but not sure what functions you get there).
That will help you select channels on your AP's based on what you neighbours are using, or not using rather. I have selected the busiest channel for my AP in the basement since it's somewhat shielded from others AP's. And the one on the top floor "sees" most of my neighbours, so it's on the channel where I see the lowest number of SSID's, and/or the lowest signal strength from others.On 2.4 Ghz you essentially only have three channels that are not overlapping, ch 1, 6 and 11. Depending on how your AP's are located in relation to each other you can try to use e.g. Channel 1 on two AP's that are far away from each other. So if you had them in a long corridor for example, you would use channels 1, 6 and 11, and then 1, 6 and 11. That way each channel is only used twice and by AP's that are as far away from each other as possible.
On 5 Ghz you have way more spectrum to play with, but also there you need to watch for overlaps. So with your 80Mhz bandwidth that you use, you are looking at channels 36, 52, 100, 116, 132 and 149.
But since some channels in the upper range are used by radar, the AP may detect that and try to change. So a similar reuse pattern as on 2.4 can be used with only the lower channels. -
@RickyBaker yes
Start as simple as possible and then build up your network. I would concentrate on the double paths reported by your switch.I assume you run a unifi network application to optimise channel selection and minimise crosstalk.
