Losing internet connection

[phoenix]

I'm having a strange problem which I seem unable to debug or find any cause. Occasionally I lose my connection to the internet, It's resolved by disabling the WAN connection then immediately enabling it. By 'occasionally' I really mean I can't give any estimate of the frequency, on the last 16.x version it would happen every 3-7 days(ish) and on the current 17.1.x release this is the first time it's happened since I installed the initial release when it first came out (plus updates, of course).

All the information on the dashboard shows as green, all the gateways are up (I'm testing an IPv^ Tunnel Broker) and IPv6 is enabled as is Suricata and SNMP - there's no memory problems and CPU usage is very low. This is installed in a VM on ESXi 6.5 with 2GB RAM, the VM tools are installed - the ESXi server itself is lightly loaded and RAM is 32GB and 6-8 GB free.

I'm about to go on holiday tomorrow evening and this leaves me with an unreliable firewall, is there any way to run a scheduled script that check for an external connection and restarts the WAN interface if it fails - I must say that I'm no use at writing scripts.

I'm at a loss as to where I should look for any useful information, can anyone point me in the right direction?

[phoenix]

Some further information, about the time I noticed the outbound connection was down the following (see attachments) appears in my monitoring software.

Nothing changed on my firewall at that point, it's been running for five+ days, is there anyway to track what might have caused that.

[Nnyan]

Is your WAN IP from your provider changing after the down times?  I had a friend with Consolidated that would have herinternet drop every time the ISP changed their IP.  I pinged her and she gave something she had found:  https://forum.pfsense.org/index.php?topic=51786.0

[phoenix]

No, the WAN IP stays the same and I can ping it it's the gateway I can't ping and that's when nothing can get out. It's a fixed IP that's allocated by DHCP (that's the way it's always been configured to get the gateway IP) but I've set it to fixed today to see if that helps. I live in France and my ISP is free.fr and I've never really had any problems with their service but something seems to have gone a bit awry at the moment.

There was one other oddity, I started a ping to google.com and that was left in a konsole while I restarted the WAN interface but as soon as I unchecked the "enable interface" box (I didn't save that or apply any settings) I noticed that ping actually made contact with google.com and getting a response - I've never seen that before. In the past I've even left it alone for an hour to see if the connection came back up, it didn't.

Thanks for that script, I'll take a look at that tomorrow and I should be able to get it running before I go on holiday and try to sort this out when I get back.