WAN connection down every 3 hours

Sleepie

Since I've installed pfSense as my firewall, my internet connection goes down for a short time about every three hours.

This is what shows in my system log:

apinger: ALARM: WAN(84.26.112.1) *** down ***
Aug 15 02:34:23	apinger: alarm canceled: WAN(84.26.112.1) *** down ***
Aug 15 02:34:25	check_reload_status: Reloading filter
Aug 15 02:34:34	check_reload_status: Reloading filter

The connection restores itself after a few seconds (I don't have to do anything), but it is still very annoying, because when this happens I get disconnected from gameservers, IRC, etc.

Does anyone have any ideas why this is happening and what to do about it?

wallabybob

I would guess either your physical link t the Internet is going down regularly OR your upstream gateway (or monitor system) is not responding in good time to say "I'm still here". The latter could be due to congestion (for example, because the response can't overtake lots of download data already queued up).

If you posted say, 5 or 6 lines from the system log immediately preceeding the extract you posted it might help narrow the possibilities.

Sleepie

Thanks for your response.

I am pretty sure my physical internet connection and/or modem are working fine.
When I was still using MS Forefront, or when I plug the cable directly into my workstation, the problem does not occur.

The thing is, there is nothing in the log before the lines I posted. The lines above those are exactly the same (with a timestamp about 3 hours earlier).
I don't know if I should set a different log level (nor how I should do that)?

The problem occurs during daytime too, when I'm not downloading anything. If anything I am gaming online, but that shouldn't be that much traffic I think. I'll try to find out if there is somehow a lot of internet traffic at the time the problem occurs.

heper

try setting the monitor ip to 8.8.8.8 - if that solves it then all is good

if that does not solve it, try changing the cable between pfsense & modem

if that does not solve it, try swapping WAN network card in pfsense

stephenw10

The apinger process periodically pings the WAN gateway (by default) in order to monitor the quality of the connection. If it sees excessively high pings times or packet loss it flags an alarm. If either metric become very high it will mark the interface as down. If you are using fail over this is used to determine which WANs are good.
Usually I would expect to see a warning in the logs about either 'delay' or 'packet loss' before the WAN is marked down however if the condition is extreme enough it may go straight to 'down'.
If the quality of your WAN connection is such that apinger is being triggered too early you can tune the thresholds in System: Gateways: Edit gateway: Advanced. You can also disable gateway monitoring completely if you don't need it fail over or load balancing (if you only have one WAN).

Steve