No WAN after IP change

[seware]

I've been running for several months on 18.7 with no issues and suddenly (as if I'm in a mystery novel) two days ago I started getting no internet access every few hours. WIFI and LAN are working fine. WAN shows down. A reboot of the opnsense vm fixes it for another couple of hours.

After few days of this I backed up my VM and then upgraded to 19.1.4 as a trial. Same issue.

I noticed this morning (after a reboot) that the WAN IP address had changed when it came back up. After another two hours... WAN is down again.

I tried powering down the cable modem overnight but that has not solved anything.

I'm technical but not versed in troubleshooting this. Any thoughts on where to start looking? cable modem\ISP? Opnsense issue? Both?

And why oh why during March Madness?!?! <argh>

Thank you to any who can point me in the right direction.

[mitsos]

When the WAN shows down, is OPNSense showing any IP on your WAN? Is your modem in bridged or in routing mode?

I'm betting a penny on an IP conflict in your ISP's network. Sounds like "it forgot" that it assigned that IP and assigns it to another customer a bit later on, which obviously is a dumpster fire.

[seware]

It seems to be locking up on lease renewal which is every 60 minutes. when it does, there is no indication in the log (that I can tell) except that no VPN gateway is available (since the VPN runs over the WAN).

I would like to think its an ISP IP conflict but whenever it goes down I and I reboot the opnsense vm, I get a new WAN IP. It will work just fine for an hour. I've now had dozens of WAN IPs; they can't all be conflicted.

1) Lease Renews - WAN dies
2) Reboot OpnSense - get new WAN IP
3) It all works for an hour
4) Repeat

this just started on friday with no changes to OpnSense at that point and my ISP says no change on their end.

[mitsos]

"no change on their end as far as they can tell", fixed that for them 

I refuse to believe your router suddenly decided to stop working without anything changing. In my 20+ years of configuring networks, I've never seen this happening. It doesn't matter if you get a dozen or a hundred IPs, compared to the hundreds of thousands your ISP is handing out, that's merely a statistical error.

Every ISP worth its salt should be able to "run a trace" (packet capture) on your connection for a few hours (usually 24 hours) to see why it stops working. Have them run this on their end.

[chemlud]

this just started on friday with no changes to OpnSense at that point and my ISP says no change on their end.

You can never know if your ISP updated some stuff on their side. Or did you do some update on the opnsense virtualisation host?

Try to power cycle the modem instead of changing/rebooting opnsense. Helps here when renewal of IP via DHCP from ISP won't succeed.

[seware]

I agree with everyone... I've been in technology for my whole career so I always start troubleshooting with "what changed". It was nothing on my end for sure. Which left: daylight savings change and cable modem that I could think of.

So, yesterday was a trial of patience with the WAN going down every hour (on the hour... 3600 renewal) A reboot of the VM OR the cable modem would fix it temporarily.  And then suddenly (again with the "suddenly") it would not get a WAN address at all. No amount of rebooting the vm or the cable modem changed things. It was late and since it already didn't work, I did a factory reset on the modem. This resulted in immediately working again and stayed that way for ~18 hours. Alas, it died an hour ago and none of the previous fixes would work.  DHCP request broadcast never got a response. I placed a call to the ISP and they "sent a reactivation code" which started things back up. It's working now but i'm dubious that it will continue. I mean, it was working fine for months and then something made it start this cycle. Crossing fingers but expecting to be buying a new cable modem soon.

Thanks for all of the suggestions.

[chemlud]

Daylight saving could mean different times at different point of failure (ISP, modem, sense).

If resetting modem (temporally) and "reactivation code" come up in the story, the ISP (firmware update of modem?) is my first suspect.

Does your sense get a private IP from the modem, if DHCP with ISP fails? Can you reach the modem's webGUI and retrieve some meaningful info from there? 


PS: Where does this 3600 sec for renewal of IP come from? ISP? I would stop this nonsense. 1 day or 1 week is completely OK imho...