Occasionally drops WAN briefly

[jpdsocal]

I'm running OPNsense 23.1.11 on a 1Gbps Frontier FIOS service in place of the ISP-provided router. It's running on a Zimaboard 432 (Intel N3450 quad core @ 1.1GHz, 4GB RAM, 32GB SSD, 2x Gigabit ethernet). Most of the time it's just fine, but around once a day, it drops the WAN connection (occasionally LAN instead, but mostly WAN) for a few seconds -- logs show the interface DOWN and then back UP normally around 3 seconds later. There is no correlation that I can determine with time of day or traffic activity. There is often a watchdog timer in the logs just before it drops, though.

Any ideas? Is my hardware simply underpowered? Are there places I should look for more debugging information? Config options I should test?

[CJ]

I'm running OPNsense 23.1.11 on a 1Gbps Frontier FIOS service in place of the ISP-provided router. It's running on a Zimaboard 432 (Intel N3450 quad core @ 1.1GHz, 4GB RAM, 32GB SSD, 2x Gigabit ethernet). Most of the time it's just fine, but around once a day, it drops the WAN connection (occasionally LAN instead, but mostly WAN) for a few seconds -- logs show the interface DOWN and then back UP normally around 3 seconds later. There is no correlation that I can determine with time of day or traffic activity. There is often a watchdog timer in the logs just before it drops, though.

Any ideas? Is my hardware simply underpowered? Are there places I should look for more debugging information? Config options I should test?

Go to System -> Gateways -> Single and edit your gateway.  Then uncheck the Disable Gateway Monitoring box.

After that you'll have a Quality tab under Reporting -> Health.  Next time the WAN drops, give it a few minutes and then take a look at what you see in the Quality tab.

If you were on cable I would blame it on line noise but with fiber you shouldn't be having an issue.

[jpdsocal]

Thanks, I've enabled that and I'll check it out. I also found this post from someone who was having a suspiciously similar issue with pfSense: https://forum.netgate.com/topic/165986/devd-ethernet-detached-event-for-wan.

The solution for their problem seemed to be to put a dumb unmanaged switch in between the router and the NIC, so I've done that and we'll see how it works out.

[abulafia]

It could also be the Realtek NICs acting flaky. Have you installed the newer driver from the plugins?

[Ricardo]

If the WAN outage is only a couple of seconds long, even if it happens "frequently", the chances of the gateway pinging catching such flapping interface is somewhat slim, so the WAN quality report will be useless in this case. Would make sense check the NIC interfaces log (or if PPPoE protocol, checking the point-to-point interface logs) for any intermittent errors, timeouts, disconnects, retries, reconnects.