Multiple Satellite WAN Questions

[Guest]

I will try this, but the second interface just hovers around 55kbs.  The other one is almost always under constant load.

-V

[tommyboy180]

Most packages and the pfsense router it self will only use the WAN interface.

If you ran bittorent or something p2p you would see both interfaces get saturated almost right away.

[Guest]

Here is some more weirdness….

I turned off the rule allowing lan traffic to any interface and forced it through the load balancing interface.  I loose the ability to browse however, there is some activity still on the modems.  Probably residual from logged settings or a stream that is still downloading.  The Proxy is no longer attached to the lan interface and transparency is turned off.  However, i can get squid to shutdown permanently and i don't want to uninstall it unless i have to.  Snort is of, Clam AV is off, Squid Guard is off, that's all I'm running.

Any thoughts?
-V

[tommyboy180]

Take a look at this: http://www.tomschaefer.org/web/wordpress/?p=538

[Guest]

Very informative artical, but didn't fix the problem.  I changed the setup in the balancer so that it monitors openDNS.  This is more accurate since it is monitoring the actual internet connection instead of the modem.  Attached is a picture of the balancer log.

Thanks for your help,
-v


[tommyboy180]

Looks like latency is the problem. Its taking to long for the ping to respond so it thinks the link is down.

I read something in the pfsense book that showed you how to increase that ping timeout.

[Guest]

For the first time, I'm hearing something that makes sense.  My usual ping time for Google.com is 800-2000ms.  For whatever reason, the load balancer is getting much higher ping times when pinging opendns.  Can anyone provide a how-to to fix the timeout?

Thanks very much,
-v

[Guest]

For the first time, I'm hearing something that makes sense.  My usual ping time for Google.com is 800-2000ms.  For whatever reason, the load balancer is getting much higher ping times when pinging opendns and a 12% loss rate.  Can anyone provide a how-to to fix the timeout?  Another weird thing is when operating under the load balancer, pages only half load or I will get white web pages or complete time outs.  Sometimes it will timeout with in a couple seconds.

Thanks very much,
-v

[tommyboy180]

I couldn't find a topic with a quick search. I need to get out of here in a sec, so you may be able to find it.

If not I read it in the pfsense book. Just search for a way to "increase ping timeout load balance". That should point you in a good direction. CMB would know.

[Guest]

Well, still struggling with this issue.  I tried 2.0 for a while but the 32 bit version was unstable under my hardware.  64 bit was stable but still too beta for my current environment.  I have now switched back to 1.2.3 and have load balancing working to a degree.  It seems that some packages break it, however im not sure which one is the problem yet.  Under a fresh install it works ok.

The issue I'm still having is pages failing to load correctly on occasion.  I some times get white pages, incomplete pages, or timeouts all together.  I'm wondering if lack of sticky connections is the problem.  However, if I turn on sticky connections, it breaks things for some reason.  My rules are:

1. secure connections -> wan2
2. default LAN-> load balancer
3. default LAN-> any

Is my issue still latency?  My numbers are usual around 1300ms.

Thanks,
-V

[tommyboy180]

I still think it is all caused by the high latency of the satellites.

In the pfsense book,

the command that is checking for a failure is:

ping -t 5 -oqc 5 -i 0.7 

This is what may be causing your problems, due to latency.
It only waits 0.7 seconds between each ping and it waits 5 seconds for a response.

According to the book these options are user changeable in 2.0 but jimp or cmb know where this setting is held. That would allow you to tweak it in version 1.2.3