Continuous pinging from pfSense box to my wireless router
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I have a pfSense box that routes traffic to my wireless router. Basically anything on the pfSense LAN goes to the pfSense WAN which is just an address on my wireless router's LAN and of course that traffic goes out to the internet.
So it looks like
pfSense LAN has a gateway of 192.168.10.1 and clients like 192.168.10.2
Wireless Router LAN has a gateway of 192.168.1.1 and clients like 192.168.1.2
pfSense WAN is basically a client on the wireless router for example 192.168.1.2I'm running wireshark and I've noticed there is a continuous ping request, one every second, from the pfSense box 192.168.1.2 to the wireless router gateway 192.168.1.1, and a reply from the wireless router gateway to its client the pfSense box.
Why is there a continuous ping from the pfSense box to my wireless router? Is it normal, is there a way to turn it off and what are the implications of doing so? Thanks
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It's normal. The continuous ping is to allow pfSense to ascertain that your upstream gateway (in this case, it's your modem/ router) o verify that the connection is active and usable.
This is helpful in multi-WAN connections where the router can detect connection failure on one link and switch to the next. It's also used to restart certain services or connections to force downstream services to change their state to reflect the loss of connection.The ping latency results are also used to generate the link quality RRD graph.
You can change both the frequency and the destination to ping - you might want to change this because your router can be up and contactable but the actual internet link may not be.
To do so, go to System -> Routing -> Gateways. Click the "e" button next to the default gateway.
Under Monitor IP, enter an alternative IP address that is on the internet and contactable through your link. e.g. Your ISP's DNS server IP or Google DNS server IP
Click on Advanced to expand it.
Under Probe interval, enter a new value (in seconds) to change the interval between pings. If you are using an external server, you might want to increase the interval in case this behaviour is deemed to be an attack.