DNS Failing every hour?

BCMguy

Hello,

I'm experiencing a really odd failure that has me baffled. Starting about 3 weeks ago every hour, at 2 minutes after the hour, I lose all internet connectivity for about 3-4 minutes. Clients cannot resolve internet addresses, including from the pfSense ping tool. WiFi connectivity remains functional (Unifi equipment) and I'm able to log into local resources like pfSense and my media servers.

I absolutely cannot find anywhere in the logs what's going on. I thought it was Unbound restarting, however the logs don't show it. Next I thought it was pfBlocker CRON as that ran on the hour, but changing the updates to every 12 hours did not resolve the connectivity issue.

I'm back on ISC DHCP server from Kea thinking that might have been part of the issue - new leases resetting unbound, but that wasn't it.

I'm at a loss. Any thoughts on what could be going on? Any suggestions on where to look in the log for possible answers? I appreciate anything you can offer. I'm very much a home user amateur and out of ideas.

Netgate 3100 appliance on 24.03.

Thank you!

Gertjan

@BCMguy

Time to activate the 'show me the answers' mode.
You have a console, or better, easier, SSH. Use it.
Go for option 8.

If this happens :

@BCMguy said in DNS Failing every hour?:

I lose all internet connectivity for about 3-4 minute

everything that is WAN related will not work anymore.
This :

@BCMguy said in DNS Failing every hour?:

Clients cannot resolve internet addresses

would be true if, at that moment, one of your clients was asking for a unknown - not cached at pfSense - host name. Resolving can't happen without a working connection.
But is is unbound that can't answer, as it can't resolve,
or is it unbound that is not running (= restarting) at that moment ?

@BCMguy said in DNS Failing every hour?:

including from the pfSense ping tool

Yeah, normal. If your uplink (WAN) is down, ping's won't pass neither.
Nothing will pass.

@BCMguy said in DNS Failing every hour?:

WiFi connectivity remains functional (Unifi equipment) and I'm able to log into local resources like pfSense and my media servers

Normal. It's only the WAN link that is down, not your other interfaces.

What does the system log tells you what happens at xxh02 ?

Use the console or SSH with menu option 8:

tail  -f /var/log/system.log

to see the same system log, but way faster.