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    Would like some guidance for troubleshooting connectivity issues with a Smart Appliance

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved General pfSense Questions
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    • johnpozJ Online
      johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
      last edited by

      Where did you sniff that? On pfsense? You can see some retrans were sent, ie device not answering..

      But from that posting. Pfsense did what was suppose to and sent traffic on to client.. Client didn't answer or didn't get it?

      An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
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        gawainxx @johnpoz
        last edited by

        @johnpoz said in Would like some guidance for troubleshooting connectivity issues with a Smart Appliance:

        Where did you sniff that? On pfsense? You can see some retrans were sent, ie device not answering..

        But from that posting. Pfsense did what was suppose to and sent traffic on to client.. Client didn't answer or didn't get it?

        This was captured on pfsense with the IF in promiscuous mode.
        The TCP re transmissions seem to go both ways in the capture. From what I've read so far this could suggest packet loss but I'm not seeing any signs of packet loss on the wan IF or on my APs. Although packet loss wouldn't necessarily explain why the issues seem to occur going both directions?

        The full packet capture i linked to has some other odd behaviour between the client and web server.

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          gawainxx
          last edited by

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          • johnpozJ Online
            johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
            last edited by

            All of that looks like just network connectivity issues..

            Again pfsense has no clue to if its wireless or wired, if it was ding something weird then all your other clients would be having sim problems.

            retrans and dup are what you see when devices don't see each other replies... Your problem is not pfsense... The problem is connectivity of the device.. Be it wireless, be it the nic on the device.

            Is there anyway to hardware the device? They have a wifi dongle, do they have a ethernet dongle?

            An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
            If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
            Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
            SG-4860 25.07 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07

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              gawainxx @johnpoz
              last edited by

              @johnpoz
              Looking closer at the capture, I see the DHCP traffic in the same timeframe now.

              Unfortunately there isn't a way to hardwire it.
              I'm however going to adjust the channel settings of my APs to see if that resolves it. If that fails I'm going to drop a hardwired AP immediately under it to see if it has any improvement.

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              • johnpozJ Online
                johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                last edited by

                If you want to prove to yourself its not pfsense.. If it was pfsense the problem would be between your wan an lan.. ie traffic hit your wan in answer, but pfsense didn't send it on.. Or traffic from the device to the internet didn't get sent out the wan.

                So sniff on the wan and the lan at the same time and then compare the sniff - is there traffic that is suppose to go to device that pfsense didn't send on? Is there traffic that hit pfsense lan side that didn't go out the wan?

                An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                SG-4860 25.07 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07

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                  gawainxx @johnpoz
                  last edited by gawainxx

                  @johnpoz said in Would like some guidance for troubleshooting connectivity issues with a Smart Appliance:

                  If you want to prove to yourself its not pfsense.. If it was pfsense the problem would be between your wan an lan.. ie traffic hit your wan in answer, but pfsense didn't send it on.. Or traffic from the device to the internet didn't get sent out the wan.

                  So sniff on the wan and the lan at the same time and then compare the sniff - is there traffic that is suppose to go to device that pfsense didn't send on? Is there traffic that hit pfsense lan side that didn't go out the wan?

                  So basically do a simultaneous capture of the WAN and LAN interface and then compare the two for differences or any unusual delay such as packets getting held up by a filter ?

                  I'll do that next after I've tested how the device behaves with a hardwired AP with a discrete SSID stationed close to it as I can.

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                  • G Offline
                    gawainxx
                    last edited by gawainxx

                    Ok so I think I may have resolved the issue.
                    While I don't have access to the device end of things, I "Think" what's happening is that the device is not only very sensitive to any sort of 2.4ghz interference, it was trying to flip flop between WAPs and went offline for an extended period of time whenever it roamed itself.

                    It seemed to be acting normally when I took spare ASUS router that I had in AP mode, hardwired via ethernet and placed it directly underneath if on the next floor down, giving it a dedicated SSID.

                    I've since adjusted the WiFi channel that the closest AP uses and created a SSID that's only on that AP which I bonded the device to. I've yet to see the behavior return over the last 19 hours since doing this. (crosses fingers)

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                    • johnpozJ Online
                      johnpoz LAYER 8 Global Moderator
                      last edited by

                      Well normally a device switching to an AP shouldn't cause a problem with connectivity.. Unless your AP are actually natting.. Since your device would still have the same IP just roaming between AP.

                      Unless sure it was having connectivity issues.

                      An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools
                      If you get confused: Listen to the Music Play
                      Please don't Chat/PM me for help, unless mod related
                      SG-4860 25.07 | Lab VMs 2.8, 25.07

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                        jimmyboyz420 Banned
                        last edited by

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