Power Failures, vSwitch & Modems

zxarr

Something has come up recently when I have a power failure at home. While my FreeNAS and ESX machines are on a UPS, the modem I use is currently not. I plan to mitigate this in the future, but for now, they're in separate rooms.

The modem is connected to a physical NIC, with a vSwitch that the pfSense VM is connected to. Herein lies the issue; pfSense never see's the NIC go down, therefore it doesn't attempt to get an address via DHCP, it just keeps the IP it was given.

Is there any way around this? Something that can be installed to monitor if the connection goes down and re-acquire an IP?

Or am I looking at assigning the NIC directly to the VM?

Thanks.

Gertjan

@zxarr said in Power Failures, vSwitch & Modems:

Is there any way around this? Something that can be installed to monitor if the connection goes down and re-acquire an IP?

Well, checkout running processes and ask yourself : what is this "dpinger" thing ?
For example : this is (one of) mine :

80199  -  Is       1:28.36 /usr/local/bin/dpinger -S -r 0 -i WAN_DHCP -B 192.168.10.11 -p /var/run/dpinger_WAN_DHCP~192.168.10.11~5.196.43.189.pid -u /var/run/dpinger_WAN_DHCP~192.168.10.11~5.196.43.189.sock -C /etc/rc.gateway_alarm -d 0 -s 500 -l 20
8

See also System Routing Gateways and check your default WAN interface.
You can set gateway monitoring,g there. It's wise to use an upstream known IP (that replies on ping).

When the monitoring fails to receive pings, it knows that the upstream gateway (and this one is some where above WAN) is down and measures will be taken, like renewing DHCP.

Note : 192.168.10.11 is my upstream router.
5.196.43.189 is the IP of one of my servers located on the net - a hop or three away.

zxarr

@Gertjan Thanks!

I found what you were referring to and noticed the dpinger processes. I don't have control of anything on the other side of my modem, but I do know the gateway address. I've had my IP change a few times over the year, to be honest... so I went with a google DNS server. It's 8 hops away, but it's not likely to change in the foreseeable future.

Thanks for the assistance.