pfSense

So the background of this bug report, is me and one other person on the netgate forums reported that when there was an outage, the PPP session was failing to automatically recover once the outage ended.

This behaviour only occurs on if_pppoe, not the old pppoe code, even when still running 2.8.x.

I have since then done lots of testing, reporting most of it back on the netgate forums, until today I decided to try running the ifconfig command to shut down the interface from command line, as I had noticed from previous testing, that the WAN interface would stay stuck in a 'UP' state without IP's when it should have been down, presumably you cannot bring a interface up when its already up, hence the problem.

This 'ifconfig pppoe2 down' command failed, the symptoms where the same, in the GUI WAN has a green up arrow, with no visible IP's, and in the command line ifconfig reported link local and interestingly, wait for it, the virtual IPv4 was still attached.

The work around's for the problem are to either reboot, or to go to the GUI, WAN settings, disable the interface, enable the interface, and after enabling then click apply, whatever this does in the background is enough to clear out the old PPP session and bring everything back online.

So it looks like at a guess from someone who isnt familiar with the PPP code on pfSense, that to fix this, all that needs to happen is a process that removes any VIP's first before initiating PPP termination, this would be the case on both manual termination and also if there is an ISP outage that triggers a timeout termination.

I hope this can be looked at for 2.8.x CE branch. As its quite a nasty bug, it can leave the firewall offline for a long time until manual intervention.