Hi pfSense Community, I'm running pfSense and have run into a problem with PPPoE. I’m on 2.1.5-RELEASE but it’s been present for at least the last three releases.
I’m a typical UK-based home user and use Zen Internet’s "Unlimited Fibre 1” package. See http://www.zen.co.uk/home-office/broadband/fibre-optic-broadband.aspx for their details. This is presented through a telco-supplied modem in my home with an ethernet port on the back, through which I connect using PPPoE. I’ve tested the PPPoE connection from a few different devices (e.g. a Billion router, my MacBook) and find it to be stable in all cases. However, using pfSense to manage my connectivity I find the connection drops regularly. There’s no pattern but it’s rare for it to survive more than a day. The result of this is that all networks connected through the pfSense box lose outbound connectivity and the WAN interface is reported as “down” on pfSense’s status page. To get it to come back I have to (1) reboot the pfSense box or (2) disable then re-enable the WAN interface in the web UI. Before reporting the problem I’ve done some digging and found that /usr/local/sbin/mpd5 is dying. If I SSH in and manually start /usr/local/sbin/mpd5 from the command line my connection returns. I’ve built my own hacky workaround for the problem: a bash script that I leave running in the background to start a new instance of mpd when it finds the pidfile of the original has gone away. [2.1.5-RELEASE][[email protected]]/root(1): cat scripts/mpd_guardian #!/usr/local/bin/bash # Repeatedly restart the mpd ppp daemon so we don't get cut off from the interwebs # Requires a copy of mpd_wan.conf in /root/scripts while sleep 5; do if [ ! -e /var/run/pppoe_wan.pid ]; then echo "** No mpd; starting a new one" /usr/local/sbin/mpd5 -k -d /root/scripts -f mpd_wan.conf -p /var/run/pppoe_wan.pid -s ppp pppoeclient else echo "** Was running; doing nothing" fi done This works, but only if I remember to start it again whenever the router boots. It would be nice if we could get to the bottom of this problem so I could do away with my ugly hack. It’s just conjecture but I’d suggest the problem is that the connection is being terminated (noise on the copper line maybe, or a reset at the ISP’s end) and rather than retrying until the connection is reestablished mpd is giving up and quitting. Further information: I’m running pfSense on a Shuttle DS47 x86 box. Since pfSense doesn’t yet support its built-in ethernet chipset I’m using a pair of USB-ethernet adapters - one for WAN, one for LAN. I have tried replacing these with alternative devices using different chipsets but it doesn’t affect the problem. It looks like similar issues are being reported in https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/1943. If I can provide more information or logs to help diagnose the issue just ask and I’ll be glad to oblige. -- Alex Hewson
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