Consistently lose connection with fios setup

[doodlesense]

Hey folks!

I've been using a protectli VP2420 running the latest versions of opnsense on a Spectrum cable connection since May 2023 with rock solid performance. I recently moved and now have Verizon fios service.

I noticed that when booting the router, I get a WAN IP and service is perfectly fine for a few minutes and then connectivity just stops working. The dashboard shows it still has a WAN IP and the logs don't show anything, but I cannot ping or resolve anything from any device, including the router itself. If I refresh dhcp on the wan port or reboot the router, I get a connection again (sometimes with a different IP) but then it generally goes down again within 10-15 minutes.

To rule out an issue with the ONT, I plugged in my backup router which is an Asus AX88U and it works perfectly for days, so it definitely seems to be some issue between the protectli and the ONT.

My configuration is set such that IPv6 is disabled and I do not use IPS. I've seen some posts about fios wan drops and the general consensus seems to be that it's usually DHCP related, but I tried various DHCP tweaks with no success (using the FreeBSD dhcp settings, tuning ARP, etc).

Anyone have any ideas of what to try next? Thanks in advance!

[doodlesense]

After traveling for almost 2 weeks and leaving my home connection on my backup router, I was able to confirm that it was completely stable the entire time, which should rule out any issues with the ONT or general connection.

Since returning, I've tried a couple more things:

• Adding a switch between the VP2420 and ONT to try to rule out any potential low level comm issues between the ONT and the Intel I225-V that the VP2420 uses
• Changing the assigned port of the WAN connection in opnsense to rule out the physical port

None of these things have solved the issue. However I've noticed that the connection can actually stay working for up to 12-24 hours at times, and then fails in the same fashion as reported above, so it's not necessarily a 10-15 minute failure rate.

I suppose the next thing(s) to try would be:

• factory reset
• possible bios update for the VP2420, though I'd imagine it would specifically need to include some sort of firmware updates for the NIC's themselves for that to matter

Anyone have any other ideas short of these? Thank you!

[doodlesense]

I was able to determine the issue for anyone else that might run into a similar problem.

After factory resetting opnsense and running it mostly vanilla with no problems for a while, I started to restore some plugins that I had been previously using. I ran into the connectivity issue again as soon as I re-enabled ntopng, which still had the same prior configuration as before the reset (I guess this config is stored separately). It turns out the setting for "Active Network Discovery" was the culprit. My best guess is that the ONT considered whatever scanning tech it was using to be malicious or buggy and would then drop the connection. Obviously that should not have been used on the WAN connection, and I wasn't really using that feature anyway.

[cY2k]

I'm really glad you posted this...  I was searching and searching google and finally came across this post. For me now, though, it seems like if I let ntopng run at all, it takes down my Fios WAN. I'd really like to be able to use it... did you ever find a workaround or anything that will make it work?  Thanks!