Auto-Reconnect to Cable modem after connection drop

yuljk

Hi guys, I've had a search on this problem but didn't manage to get much information.

I'm looking for a way for Pfsense to automatically renew it's lease on the WAN interface from my cable modem automatically in the event that my internet connection drops and then comes back up.

At the moment, I have to login to the web interface and click 'renew' for my WAN interface to renew the lease in the event that this happens. This isn't particularly convenient if I'm 60 miles away from home.

I've read a thread about a guy who came up with a bash script which automtically restarts his Comcast modem.. perhaps something along those lines may help.

Thanks in advance.

mhab12

What version of pfSense are you running? I have seen this issue on one of the 1.2.3 release candidates, but there was a known issue with the DHCP client that has since been corrected. What if you just forced the DHCP client to auto-renew every 15 minutes or something?

yuljk

Hi, I'm running 1.2.3-RELEASE. How would I go about auto-renewing the DHCP lease on the WAN interface?

Cheers for the help

The Printer Elf

Same problem here, but running 1.2.2.
Would it be possible to implement a script that auto-renews if the connection drops below a certain level of activity (say 2kb/s) for longer than 15 mins?
I'm suggesting this as a monitor because it's very easy to spot on the RRD charts if the connection is down because the scale is +/- 150b/s, and if there's no-one using the connection (heaven forbid!) then it doesn't matter that an auto-renew is happening every 15 mins!

j0ris

If all you want is to auto-renew your DHCP every 15 minutes, then I'd just create a cron job:

crontab -e

and enter something like

0,15,30,45 * * * /sbin/dhclient rl0

where rl0 is your WAN interface

yuljk

Cheers for the reply.

I have downloaded my config.xml and added the following to the section

<minute>/5</minute>
<hour></hour>
<mday></mday>
<month></month>
<wday>*</wday>
<who>root</who>
<command></command>0,15,30,45 * * * /sbin/dhclient vr1

(vr1 being my WAN interface)
I then uploaded the modified config and rebooted pfsense.

Does this look ok?

Thanks

j0ris

Then it should be:

		 <minute>0,15,30,45</minute>
			<hour>*</hour>
			<mday>*</mday>
			<month>*</month>
			<wday>*</wday>
			<who>root</who>
			<command></command>/sbin/dhclient vr1

yuljk

Thanks for the reply, I have ammended config.xml.

Cheers