Intermittent Internet troubleshooting
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Hey guys, have the internet randomly going down on my setup and just wondering what I can do to troubleshoot it.
I just bought a brand new i5 with a GIGABYTE GA-H170N-WIFI motherboard, 16gb of Ram, an Intel SSD drive, and a Intel dual gigabit PCIe network card, so I didn't skimp on the hardware. I am using the onboard igb0 for Wan and em0 for Lan connected to a Cisco gigabit switch on 2.2.6.
Randomly I will sit down at my computer and have the yellow exclamation mark by the networking icon stating that there is no internet. I can open putty or get into the router using the web interface, both work fine. I try to ping to 8.8.8.8 through putty or the web interface and both get 100 percent packet loss, no return packets so I assume the internet is down. I looked in the system logs and cannot see anything at all. Also a reboot of PFsense will get things back up until the next time it goes down. Last time it was up for about 20 hours.
How do I go about troubleshooting this? it is very frustrating, especially since I didn't cheap out and my system is very simple at this point, haven't even added OpenVPN or anything. Just want to get things stable before I complicate it any more. I have also turned off gateway monitoring as I had issues with that on my old system. CPU and Ram usage is always only at a couple percent.
Any help would be VERY much appreciated.
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Just went down again after 1 hour 9 minutes.
Rebooted and router hung on Wan configuration during boot for about 2 minutes. Continued booting and didn't get a WAN address. Had to shut down router, power cycle my switch and cable modem. Booted normally and got a WAN ip after that.
This sucks! Need some help from the networking pros :)
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Try eliminating your onboard NIC. Use the second port on your Intel NIC.
Make sure your network cable is good, factory-crimped stuff.
Gateway monitoring (apinger) is still broken. Don't bother using it (for now).
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just went down again. gateway monitoring disabled, changed cable, and will try both Intel add on nics.
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moved it around so that the Wan is em1 and Lan is em0 on the Intel addon card. Not sure if I mentioned this in my first post but the onboard NIC is also Intel, igb0.
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still went down.. pulled the dual Intel nic and replace with a single Intel nic. So now running onboard Intel nic for Wan and Addon card for LAN. Running like 10 instances of youtube and Netflix and it seems to be running smooth so far.. I really hope it was the dual card.
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went down again. Had like 10 youtube and netflix sessions going, was working great.
Anyone have any ideas for me? i am about to abandon Pfsense all together, sheesh.
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I feel like I'm talking with myself :)
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still went down.. pulled the dual Intel nic and replace with a single Intel nic. So now running onboard Intel nic for Wan and Addon card for LAN. Running like 10 instances of youtube and Netflix and it seems to be running smooth so far.. I really hope it was the dual card.
Did you try flipping bot interface? Use add-on for WAN and LAN onboard?
How about when you had your dual card did the traffic went on it for both wan and lan?
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I did. I tried all configs. one Intel nic on board isn't supported by 2.2.6 so I updated to 2.3 as it is supported. so now I am runnin. 2.3 with no add on card in the PCIe slot, 2 built in Intel cards. I am really running out of options. I use and need 3 cards in my setup so I will see what happens with this. . very frustrating.
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I am not the one with the most extensive experience in pfsense but if you could show some logs I'm sure more advanced users could chip in…
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that's the weird part, the logs say nothing.
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What is your WAN connected to? Could the problem be with that?
You said you upgraded from 2.2.6. Have you tried saving.your settings and do a clean install of 2.3?
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i switched the WAN to pretty much every NIC i had. I just did a fresh install of 2.3 and everything is working for now but before it took sometimes minutes, sometimes hours, sometimes days to go down. have my fingers crossed. I was just hoping to get some trouble shooting techniques to try to figure WTF is happening. My kids are killing me with the internet going up and down all day long :)
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Is 2.3 available now. I only see 2.2.6.
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it is just a snap shot, not the full supported release.
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back to screwed again.. Can't believe how unstable this is. I thought that 2.3 fixed the problem. Internet just goes down, only way to get it back up is a reboot. NOTHING in the logs at all. WTF can I do to fix this? I want to chuck the whole thing out the f'n window.
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And your WAN is what: DHCP, PPPoE, static - all that connected to a switch/modem/router/… ?
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wan is dhcp, connected directly to Nic. then Lan nic connected to small 5 port switch. haven't even got openVPN setup yet, trying to keep it very simple to get it stable.
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You mentioned Netflix and video so understand this may be a total stab in the dark but check this post out.
https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=109323.0 -
wan is dhcp, connected directly to Nic.
To NIC of what?
Please provide some more infos for us to get the picture. Right now it's shooting in the dark. -
here is a map of my network in it's simplest form..
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4IAV3fk9yIYT3VUQ3pzeFFEbWM/view?usp=sharing
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when u have connectivity issue try to ping the following
PFsense LAN ? success /Fail
PFsense WAN ?
Cisco LAN ?
CISCO WAN
8.8.8.8
www.google.com -
Was there ever a solution to this problem? I'm experiencing the same thing.
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honestly, I had Shaw come out to replace the modem but it was working pretty good before then. I am up and running fine now with the network card I thought was a problem. I honestly think the problem, at least for me was 2.3 and using dns resolver.
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Glad to see you had a fix. I changed motherboard and still nothing. if I connect ISP to my PC everything works great. as soon as I put pfSense in the middle the problems start. :'(
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ate you running 2.2.6?
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2.3 would you recommend downgrading?
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I'm no expert but it looks like there are some issues with it. it would rule it out. 2.2.6 is tried and true.
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Well. Tried going down to 2.2.6 and no good. tried 2.2.3 still same thing. Tried 2 different Hardware and still same thing. but if I connect the ISP directly to the PC everything works fine. This is really frustrating.
