Hello,
I am a newbie LEAF user, and I am afraid that this message might be somewhat off topic, but...
I have installed the Bering LEAF, and it seems to be working well except that my PPP connection is slow and unreliable. I suspect that this is nothing to do with LEAF, but I do need to diagnose just what is causing the problem.
It could be my ISP, my phone lines, my modem or my configuration.
WIth this little to go on, serious troubleshooting is impossible. But here are a few preliminary thoughts that might help you pin down the source of the problem.
1. Does the problem show up at the packet level? That is, does "ip -s link show" report significant numbers of problem packets after one of the application-level failures you mention below?
2. If you ping the other end of the ppp0 connection (your gateway address, that is), are the return times reasonablly low? Are they consistent over a large number of pings?
3. Since LEAF systems don't usually have browsers and MUAs on them, I surmise that the tests you report below involve software on the "old setup" that was showing problems before you went to LEAF. Does that system seem to connect well to the LEAF system? And to whatever else is on your LAN? (And *how* does it connect? Did you add a NIC to it for LAN access, or was it always attached to a LAN somehow?)
4. Is the phone line you use to connect to your ISP a dedicated line, or are there other devices on it? Either way, were there any changes to its physical setup you can associate with the loss or quality?
5. Might the line speed for the underlying ppp connection have changed? This, as I recall, is hard to determine using ppp tools; it is easier if you can make a shell connection somewhere using minicom (though even then you usually need to change you modem settings to get it to report the phone-side speed and not the serial-side speed back to the terminal).
6. While "a tendency to time out or lose their socket" is clearly a problem (at least if it happens a lot, not rarely), "slow" is just slow and may or may not be indicative of a problem. What is the throughput on the line in normal circumstances (try a large ftp download to measure it)?
7. Does your Web access occur directly or do you use an application proxy at the ISP's end? If thee second, is it the same host you are getting your e-mail from (you don't say, but I'm guessing that the e-mail failures occur during POP3 or IMAP downloads from your ISP's mail relay)?
That's all I can think of to ask in a first-round way, except, of course, for the usual suspects -- in this case, including the details of the ppp setup and any relevant log entries.
A previous linux system, using the same ISP and modem has worked well in the past, however I had started to suffer from similar problems before installing LEAF, which is why I decided to try a separate firewall. My theory was that I was suffering from my own configuration errors, and that I could isolate the problem by minimising the system. I no longer have access to my "old" setup, although I did use some settings from the old setup to help me install PPP in my LEAF.
I would welcome any suggestions about how to debug, isolate and diagnose the problem.
I am using a 56k serial modem over ordinary phone line. Communication is slow, and large web pages, or large (usually spam) email messages have a tendency to time out or lose their socket.
The machine is at home, and I am at work, so requests for log files etc. will require some time.
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