After firewall rebooted/power-on, apinger never starts automatically

[Taomyn]

Since I installed 16.7 and now on 16.7.6-amd64, I have had the apinger service enabled and not once has the service started by itself on restart/power-up. It's always stopped and I have to start it manually which then runs successfully.

Any idea why, have I missed a configuration setting somewhere?

My only gateway is my WAN_PPOE.

[Julien]

are you on a hardware or virtual gateway ?
this is a hardware related configuration.
check your bios to enable this.
i have done on my home old pc using it as opnsense for testing.

[Taomyn]

It's a small-form-factor PC - what BIOS setting is this related to and why if it "was" disabled would it then work after the firewall is started up and fully functioning? Sorry for the basic question, I couldn't find to much about this on-line.

are you on a hardware or virtual gateway ?
this is a hardware related configuration.
check your bios to enable this.
i have done on my home old pc using it as opnsense for testing.

[franco]

It's very likely this bug: https://github.com/opnsense/core/issues/1016

Apinger historically drops privileges, so it can't reconfigure itself later. That reconfigure wasn't necessary in the original apinger because it used a raw socket, but when it was incorporated into pfSense, it was changed to be a static gateway monitoring tool for multi-wan and never quite fixed for the task.

Now the interface up comes into play, if it can't show an address when apinger tries to configure, apinger drops it as a target. And if it's the only target, apinger exits. This is easily confirmed by starting apinger manually later and all is ok.

We've started to work on apinger, though at the moment my primary care is making the transition to FreeBSD 11.0 as easy as possible for 17.1.

The new apinger home is on GitHub for better visibility.

https://github.com/opnsense/apinger

The question is if we should stop dropping privileges, or plug apinger into devd events or do something completely different. I don't know.


Cheers,
Franco

[Taomyn]

Thanks Franco - at least I understand and it's not system critical, just a nuisance.