Apinger exits when no useable targets but is not restarted

[phil.davis]

2.1.1-PRERELEASE (i386)
built on Sat Jan 25 10:00:56 EST 2014
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p14

I find these things when testing, which often means they are with out-of-the-ordinary sequences. So I don't know if this is already an issue with 2.1-RELEASE or a regression. I downloaded the upgrade file to my laptop, then did a manual upgrade of an Alix 2D13 test system completely offline. Thus, when it booted, it had no WAN (the cable was not plugged in). This appears in the gateway log, and is entirely reasonable:

Jan 26 21:49:51 	apinger: Starting Alarm Pinger, apinger(16508)
Jan 26 21:49:51 	apinger: No usable targets found, exiting

The WAN is set to DHCP. I connect a cable from pfSense WAN to my home LAN. pfSense WAN gets an IP address handed to it by my LAN router - good. Internet works - good. But apinger is still down, and nothing seems to start it.
I start it from the webGUI and away it goes, dashboard shows gateway latency etc.
On a single-WAN system this problem has no effect on real users. But on a multi-WAN system, a missing apinger means that there will be nothing to monitor and respond to gateway status changes.

Note: On my production systems I have Service Watchdog package installed and watching apinger, DNS forwarder… so that could be covering up any times when this "apinger is not started" thing occurs.

[kswtch]

A similar behavior is observed in multi-WAN setups when one gateway goes down. apinger stops monitoring the gateway and therefore never sees it coming up again. The gateway is not usable unless apinger is restarted. This has been reported in Bug #742. The bug is closed since some years but still present in the current release. Maybe someone can reopen the report and look into it.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to get apinger checking the gateway again after it went down? A watchdog isn't going to help here because apinger is happily monitoring the other gateway.

Thanks,
Daniel

[jimp]

@kswtch:

A similar behavior is observed in multi-WAN setups when one gateway goes down. apinger stops monitoring the gateway and therefore never sees it coming up again. The gateway is not usable unless apinger is restarted. This has been reported in Bug #742. The bug is closed since some years but still present in the current release. Maybe someone can reopen the report and look into it.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to get apinger checking the gateway again after it went down? A watchdog isn't going to help here because apinger is happily monitoring the other gateway.

It's probably a completely different issue worthy of its own thread/bug. The bug you referenced hasn't been a problem in quite some time, or there would be numerous people with broken Multi-WAN out there, but that is not the case. It works fine for most people, so it must be something specific to your setup.

[phil.davis]

2.1.1-PRERELEASE (i386)
built on Sun Feb 2 12:42:30 EST 2014
FreeBSD 8.3-RELEASE-p14

I tested this again. Booted a test system with single DHCP WAN disconnected. After boot there is no "apinger", which is fine. Connected the WAN cable, it got DHCP and apinger also got started up. The Gateways log looks like this:

Feb 3 15:26:35 	apinger: Starting Alarm Pinger, apinger(20597)
Feb 3 15:26:35 	apinger: No usable targets found, exiting
Feb 3 15:35:39 	apinger: Starting Alarm Pinger, apinger(12324)

Something in amongst fixing the pfSctl stuff I suppose has also fixed this.
I can't find anything else wrong with what I use in 2.1.1-prerelease - I guess it is just the ixgbe driver stuff that still seems to need looking at as per other threads.

[krylou]

@kswtch:

A similar behavior is observed in multi-WAN setups when one gateway goes down. apinger stops monitoring the gateway and therefore never sees it coming up again. The gateway is not usable unless apinger is restarted. This has been reported in Bug #742. The bug is closed since some years but still present in the current release. Maybe someone can reopen the report and look into it.

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to get apinger checking the gateway again after it went down? A watchdog isn't going to help here because apinger is happily monitoring the other gateway.

Thanks,
Daniel

Check solution here https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php/topic,69533.msg394384.html#msg394384
I created script for cron to restart apinger each 5 minutes.