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    "Member Down" problem

    Scheduled Pinned Locked Moved Routing and Multi WAN
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    • K Offline
      kevindd992002
      last edited by

      @cmb:

      Your averaged out loss is upwards of 18%, you're definitely getting cycles where it's over 20%, and 20% will take down the WAN. Increase the loss threshold if that's normal behavior for your WAN. I suspect you either have shaping or limiters configured in such a way that you're de-prioritizing and dropping your monitor pings, or you have an issue of some sort with that connection if it gets that bad under load.

      No shaping or limiters configured, I guess it's just the normal behavior of our ISP since I'm from the Philippines. So the packet loss there can translate to a failed "probe" for the member down criterion?

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      • K Offline
        kejianshi
        last edited by

        Mine here is globe DSL.  For sure they do LOTS of really poorly executed traffic shaping.
        Especially where UDP VPNs are concerned.  Pretty much only TCP 80 and 443 are reliable.

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        • K Offline
          kevindd992002
          last edited by

          @kejianshi:

          Mine here is globe DSL.  For sure they do LOTS of really poorly executed traffic shaping.
          Especially where UDP VPNs are concerned.  Pretty much only TCP 80 and 443 are reliable.

          That's on their side. What we're talking about here is a simple probe of IP address (in my case public DNS servers). cmb is talking about traffic shaping on the pfsense side itself and not by the ISP.

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          • K Offline
            kejianshi
            last edited by

            Could be.
            But I didn't necessarily see it that way.
            I think traffic shaping on the ISP side done badly is just as bad.
            BTW - I have same problem as yours with one of these running in texas on Time Warner Cable.
            No shaping on pfsense.  Definitely the ISP. Just crap latency.  Terrible network.
            Thats the one that I gave up on, turned of gateway monitor and things were then much improved.

            BTW - My globe dsl router has a few things I had to change.
            One of which was DDOS protection.  Particularly "ping to death" protection.
            That was screwing things up here.

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            • K Offline
              kevindd992002
              last edited by

              @kejianshi:

              Could be.
              But I didn't necessarily see it that way.
              I think traffic shaping on the ISP side done badly is just as bad.
              BTW - I have same problem as yours with one of these running in texas on Time Warner Cable.
              No shaping on pfsense.  Definitely the ISP. Just crap latency.  Terrible network.
              Thats the one that I gave up on, turned of gateway monitor and things were then much improved.

              Yeah but I wouldn't want to disable gateway monitoring altogether as failover won't work if you do that. Increasing the thresholds should fix this problem, no brainer.

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              • K Offline
                kejianshi
                last edited by

                Sounds good - Then they can mark all the apinger threads as "solved" (-;

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                • K Offline
                  kevindd992002
                  last edited by

                  @kejianshi:

                  Sounds good - Then they can mark all the apinger threads as "solved" (-;

                  What do you mean all apinger threads solved? Why would they do that?

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                  • K Offline
                    kevindd992002
                    last edited by

                    @cmb, what value should I set for the packet loss threshold? Would 20/30 be a good try?

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                    • P Offline
                      phil.davis
                      last edited by

                      The packet loss threshold really depends on the typical link performance. For example, I have some links where if the link is being used heavily, a lot of the monitor pings get lost for whatever reason, but actually the link is passing traffic at full speed. (I probably should put some traffic shaping on that and give the ICMP some high priority and see if I can improve that behaviour…). So for those I even put 40%/50% so that the link is only declared down if it really gets bad.
                      For links in less remote places than me, but with this kind of symptoms when saturated with traffic, I guess that 20%/30% will be OK.
                      You really need to run a few downloads in parallel on clients and observe "normal" numbers, then set higher.

                      As the Greek philosopher Isosceles used to say, "There are 3 sides to every triangle."
                      If I helped you, then help someone else - buy someone a gift from the INF catalog http://secure.inf.org/gifts/usd/

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                      • K Offline
                        kevindd992002
                        last edited by

                        Gotcha, thanks!

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                        • K Offline
                          kejianshi
                          last edited by

                          I think my gateways don't like being pinged all the time.  You would think my gateway would allow as much traffic as I feel like sending of any type I chose up to my bandwidth limit, but I have seen on two seperate boxes now where if I'm pinging the gateway every second, my pings eventually get blocked and the gateway reads as down all the time.

                          I've seen it separately on one IPV4 and one IPV6 gateway on two totally separate boxes.  I know this has nothing at all to do with pfsense and is just a case of the ISP being stupid, but in both cases pinging only every 10 seconds seems to result in me not getting blocked or having my pings dropped.

                          Separately, I also raised the thresholds as you described.

                          I have one IP I tried for gateway monitoring that drops allows 2 pings, drops the third, allows two more, drops the third…  Consistently.
                          I'm not using that for gateway monitor, of course, but it took me a while to discover it and the behavior seems nonsense to me because, after all, why should pings from a legitimate source get thrown into bit heaven for no apparent reason?

                          All this silliness from those ISPs effects pfsense stability, but its not pfsense fault.

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                          • K Offline
                            kevindd992002
                            last edited by

                            Interesting. But in my case, the monitor IP's I'm using are DNS servers, opendns' and google's so I don't think pinging them every second would do the same behavior you're seeing, right?

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                            • K Offline
                              kejianshi
                              last edited by

                              Not sure - Its been plenty of time since my post and slowing down my pings seems to have made a lot of difference on my gateways at least.

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                              • luckman212L Offline
                                luckman212 LAYER 8
                                last edited by

                                @cmb:

                                Down == above the defined thresholds you have on the gateway for what should be considered down.

                                Chris if you get a chance, I started a new thread related to this but not sure you saw it. Hoping for a little color on those apinger settings  :)

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