Dropped DSL Connection w/Redhat 7.1
 

Hi All,

(sorry if its muddy; I'm still finding my way around)

I'm using DSL from SWB with a dynamic IP.
Recently I installed Redhat 7.1 telling it to use DHCP and everything went great.

However, the network connection drops every couple of hours and I can not figure out why.

I've checked messages and sometimes see a message that the lease on the address couldn't be renewed, but most of the time nothing in the log about dhcp or pump or the address lease.

When I check netstat I see address like default have disappeared.
When I check ifconfig it says everything is great (eth0 up and all)

Nameservers are in resolv.conf

If I restart the network or just bring eth0 down then up, everything is instantly OK again and not always accompanied by a change in IP.

At first I thought maybe it was somehow related to inactivity, but I used cron to do a ping every 15 minutes, and that didn't have any effect.

Other than having to cycle eth0 from time to time, it seems fine.

I think I have something screwy in my Linux setup because I tried a Mac and an NT machine and neither exhibits this behavior. (The NT machine complains frequently about difficulty renewing the lease in the log, but the connection doesn't seemt to every drop)

I'd love to where to start trying to work out this kink, any help would be greatly appreciated!

sounds like a lease renewal issue.

What distribution? what dhcp client are your running?

If you are running /sbin/dhcpcd then check the files in /etc/dhcpc directory.

There should be a .info file for your card, it has the renewall and lease times. With that, you should be able to figure about when your lease expires. If it coincides with the outage then you are having issues renewing your lease.

Run dhcpcd with the -d option for extra debugging to syslog. Then you can grep your /var/log/messages file for dhcpcd complaints.

Dropped DSL Connection
 

Orvin,

Do you have a DSL filter on all your telephones?

When I first go DSL, I was short one filter so I did not put one on my daughter's phone since she was away at college.

My DSL connection (via linksys router) was dropping at least once a day. Over Christmas I bought a filter for her phone since she was home.

I have had only one or two drops in the last three months.

Had the same problem with my DSL dynamic setup it had to be the firewall script I was using at first, I switched to Firestarter and its been running 3 weeks without dropping

I'm having a very similar problem. I just intalled RedHat 7.2 and it appears my dhcp lease is getting renewed between 15 - 25 minutes.

I checked the setting in /etc/dhcpc/dhcpcd-eth0.info and the leasetime appears to be set to about 4 days.

This is reinitializing the ip_forward setting and the ipchains rules and causing all the machines behind the linux box to lose their Internet access.

Any suggestions?

Tom

I had the exact same issue in Ubuntu. My connection does not seem to drop after I wrote a small code to call a specific website and download the html content of the index page. This code is called in cron every 5 minutes.

For some reason, just pinging does not seem to work for me. But making a http call and getting something back seems to work for me.

This solution is hackish. There must be a more elegant solution involving some driver update or some tricky configuration. But until I find that - this stop gap works great for me.