Bug #9351: need option for repeated DHCP retries - pfSense - pfSense bugtracker

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Bug #9351

closed

need option for repeated DHCP retries

Added by John Pierce about 5 years ago. Updated over 4 years ago.

Status:

Duplicate

Priority:

Normal

Assignee:

Category:

Interfaces

Target version:

Start date:

02/25/2019

Due date:

% Done:

Estimated time:

Plus Target Version:

Release Notes:

Affected Version:

2.4.4_2

Affected Architecture:

Description

every time my cable company has an outage of more than a few minutes, pfsense ends up with no IP address on WAN, and I have to manually tickle release/reserve to get things working again. not easy when I'm not home, and my wife is a telecommuter, and gets really upset when the net is down during her working hours.

the problem is, the cable /modem/ stays alive so there's no loss of ethernet on WAN, so there's nothing to trigger the dhcp client to resume.

I propose you add an option to keep retrying DHCP renews on the WAN when the gateway becomes inaccessible.

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Updated by Anonymous about 5 years ago

"propose you add an option to keep retrying DHCP renews on the WAN when the gateway becomes inaccessible." - Based on what you've said, the gateway doesn't become inaccessible. That's why it's broken.

Have you tried setting the monitor IP (static routes, WAN interface) to something out on the Internet?
I suspect it's just set to ping your cable modem.

This is an inherent problem with DHCP leases, there's no state, so there's no (easy) way to know when it's broken/changed.

I don't think this is a pfSense bug - from the pfSense manual:

"Alternative Monitor IP: An address to ping via this gateway instead of the gateway itself. If the gateway is local, such as one directly on a CPE or modem, then pinging a remote address such as a DNS server is a better measure of how useful or alive the WAN may be."

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Updated by John Pierce about 5 years ago

the cable modem (Arris/Moto SB6183) has no ip, its a bridge, the gateway is somewhere at my ISP. the modem stays alive, but the gateway goes unreachable when there's a cable system outage. we've had two this winter, one was about 8 hours, the 2nd outage last night was about 1 hour. changing the monitor address would not help this, afaik, it detected gateway down, and the WAN dhcp timed out, then it retried however many times and quit trying.

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