Multi WAN failover –arprequest: cannot find matching address - errors
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I am in the process of setting a new PfSense router to provide failover protection on my WAN connections and I’m having pages of arprequest errors in the system log and on the monitor whenever I swap from one interface to the other. I’m looking for help and suggestions on what I’m doing wrong as I have reviewed all the videos and docs I can find and remain stumped.
Historically I have had a 2.5Mbps DSL connection to a very remote location, no other land-based service has been available (no cable, cell, fiber, etc). We are at the tail end of a LONG copper wire pair in the woods back to a telephone switch station in town. Almost a year ago I signed up to receive a Starlink system and it has just arrived. Since my DSL service is stone age slow and sometimes sketchy at best and the Starlink system reliability is yet unproven at my location, it is my desire to implement WAN failover for both systems for the next year or so before I say goodbye to the DSL service as they still call it “highspeed internet” and charge accordingly….
I am running PfSense Plus 22.01 on a Protectli FW4B (J3160) with 8Meg of ram and 64G of mSATA SSD . Gateway monitoring IP is active with 8.8.8.8 for igb0 and 8.8.4.4 for igb2, Gateway groups have been established with tier levels, the trigger level is ‘member down’ and the LAN rule changed to prefer igb2 group. The failover appears to work well (internet access from igb0 and igb2 as selected by cable swap after a few moments wait – typically less than 15-30 seconds) with a few glitches. At my current build location I only have one WAN so I am swapping the WAN cable back and forth from igb0 to igb2 (igb1 is the LAN) simulating the WAN lines interface going up and down. After each swap I get pages of arp address issues (“arprequest: cannot find matching address” see clip below). This continues for several minutes (approx. 10) decreasing to an infrequent occurrence (settles down to very infrequent after approx. 30 min) until I swap the cable again and it starts again. If I don’t do a cable swap after a Pfsense restart, I never see any of these errors. The only other anomaly I have seen is rarely, after swapping from igb0 to igb2, the dpringer service stops and I must manually restart it. I have installed a workaround for this issue by installing Service_Watchdog and having it automatically restart the service. I have not seen a similar issue when swapping back (igb2 to igb1). Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
