Have a client whose Internet connection is less then reliable. It's cable service and the cable company always claims there is nothing wrong on their end. Of course the service is intermittent and by the time the onsite clerk calls the ISP it's usually back up and always by the time they get someone sent out.
The problem is ongoing - it was a problem before I took over the account, and is still a problem even though the previous firewall has been replaced with a shiny OpenBSD box and the previous rented cable modem has also been replaced with a shiny new Arris model (separated by a few months). I discovered that when the problem occurs I (of course) cannot connect to the firewall remotely, nor can I ping it. However I can ping the gateway node. Which to me says the problem is between the ISP gateway node and the cable modem. Two cable modems with the same issue lead me to discount them as the problem, and two firewalls with the same problem are a bit far fetched as well. Plus the OpenBSD firewall logs no errors, either in dmesg or any other log file. I would like to be able to provide a way to document the outage no matter when it occurs both via some job running on the firewall and a job running remotely - to be positive that when the Internet cannot be seen from the firewall the problem is at the suspected gateway node and that at the same time the remote job can verify that the gateway node can be seen but the firewall cannot, creating logs in both systems only during the outage times. All of this possibly under the mistaken idea that I can actually get WOW to repair their service. Would like some suggestions on ways to about this. Thanks, Chris
