Listening for WAN outages - possible?
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Hi,
I occasionally have annoying outages, short for the most part in my WAN connection. My ISP has no idea what it can be and didn't seem to care much, so... Would it be possible in the pfSense to set up some kind of logging of incoming traffic/link? I'm guessing it's a problem in their end somewhere, but naturally need to know more of the cause somehow. I'm mostly noting it when streaming music, not streaming movies, so perhaps caused within that service, but have lately seen it here at the forum as well, briefly losing connection, but reestablished almost immediately. Any ideas are greatly appreciated. (I know I could setup a Wireshark or similar, but if there is a lighter solution, that's what I'd like to try first)
Thanks
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What I did when I had a similar problem is I wrote a shell script which pinged my ISP's router at regular intervals and recorded the failures.
Here's my script:
#! /bin/sh
while [ 1 ]
do
ping <destination> -4 -c 1 || date >> ~/log;sleep 50
doneReplace <destination> with the test address. This was used on Linux, but should be the same on FreeBSD.
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If you are actually seeing WAN disconnects that will be logged in the system and gateway logs.
The gateway monitoring uses the WAN gateway IP by default and that will show packet loss or latency spikes. The first thing I would do is check the graphs in Status > Monitoring.
Steve
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Thank you guys!
I will check out monitoring as mentioned, haven't had time to do as much as I'd want yet, but will in time. And thanks for the script, also an great way of doing it :) This will get me started to hopefully find the occurrence, and when done, perhaps my ISP can start look for the cause.
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@furom Something I find useful in your situation is to ping multiple IPs. It can help you get an idea of where the problem is. I usually do something like this from a workstation on the LAN:
- LAN GW - This can help discover issues with on-site cabling and equipment. This is the pfSense LAN IP.
- WAN IP - This can help discover issues with the firewall (ex: maxed out CPU).
- WAN GW - This can help discover issues with the ISP.
- ISP DNS - This can help discover issues with the ISP.
- 1.1.1.1 - This can help discover issues with the ISP or the Internet in general.
If you have several days of stats from all of those, you can look at outages and see where the issue starts to occur (local vs ISP vs Internet).
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@ryan29 said in Listening for WAN outages - possible?:
@furom Something I find useful in your situation is to ping multiple IPs. It can help you get an idea of where the problem is. I usually do something like this from a workstation on the LAN:
- LAN GW - This can help discover issues with on-site cabling and equipment. This is the pfSense LAN IP.
- WAN IP - This can help discover issues with the firewall (ex: maxed out CPU).
- WAN GW - This can help discover issues with the ISP.
- ISP DNS - This can help discover issues with the ISP.
- 1.1.1.1 - This can help discover issues with the ISP or the Internet in general.
If you have several days of stats from all of those, you can look at outages and see where the issue starts to occur (local vs ISP vs Internet).
This was interesting, thank you! I like that it's simple, yet gives a broader view, Will give it a try. :)
