[nzlug] IPCop Stalling

[Howard]

on 8/02/2007 1:28 a.m. Nevyn wrote:

>> on 7/02/2007 1:59 p.m. Nevyn wrote:
>> > Just about every night my ADSL router appears to drop the connection
>> > and then connect almost immediately (normal behavior I would've
>> > thought).
>> >
>> > However IPCop seems to have a problem with it.

> Whoa there big boy!

Hi Nevyn again... sorry - I can type questions faster than I can think...

> It's an external ADSL modem - it's a dinosaur which I picked up off
> trade me ages ago and had to update it with a similar but by no means
> meant for this particular modem updated firmware to fix a problem with
> bridging.

I don't know much about how the bridging works with PPPoA then sorry - 
mine is an internal adsl modem.  I'm guessing it is a VPN connection 
between the IPCop and the Router? I don't see how else you'd get the 
external IP address on the IPCop box & avoid using NAT?

Not a hardware problem with the router overheating or anything?

Can you find a similar router to try? (What is it? - I have a couple of 
older ones sitting around...)

> So in answer to your next question, the red device gets it's IP
> address from the ADSL modem - so it has the external IP addy meaning
> that all the modem is doing is routing information from the phone
> lines into a more usable Ethernet connection and the IP Cop box is
> taking care of things from there. The green device is static.
 >
> I'm assuming that Slingshot is renewing the IP address when this
> happens as it seems to be fairly constant. I.e. it happens around 4am
> in the morning. I did have the IP Cop box rebooting at around 5 in the
> morning but kept on getting woken up by the beeps when it starts up
> and sometimes it either didn't need the reboot or the disconnect would
> happen much earlier.

I'd still check that this is truly the case.  Write down the IP each day 
(or check the logs...) - you may be allocated the same one, in which 
case why does the network drop?  Also, has it always happened?  You 
haven't just had a burglar alarm installed on the same phone line?

> Yep, definitely version 1.4.13 and definitely on addon's. Basically it
> has to just behave as a embedded device - I like what it does and I
> don't care how it does it.

Mine is the same - and doesn't seem to have this issue.  Until the last 
IPCop update it was about 60 days uptime.  My present ISP is IHUG.

> What I'm looking for is some kind of time out - If it's been trying to
> connect for say.... more than 5 minutes, disconnect and try again.

Well, pretty much every web based IPCop click has a shell script 
associated with it, so it's no problem to shell into the box, find what 
the scripts are for connecting (red-network-up & red-network-down or 
something similar from memory) and add some extra checks.  Or write a 
script to check, and use cron to run it hourly.

I have seen (and used in an earlier version of IPCop) a script to check 
to see if the box was online (a simple ping), and connect if it wasn't 
using the up script.  This was when the driver for my adsl card was not 
fantastic, and would sometime lose connectivity.  (I also had it SMS me 
when the IP address changed, back in the day when you could free sms via 
ICQ - anything is possible on the command line).

In fact there may even be an unofficial add-on to check the network and 
put in delays before reconnecting rather than having to script something.

Howard