Linksys router; Can't stay connected? <b>Unacceptable</b>

I happen to find out (on page 34 out of 59), after a week, why the
router I recently bought "can stay connected". Finally. The
documentation reads : (My connection is PPPoE, router is Linksys BEFSR41)

"PPPoE is not actually a dedicated or always-on connection. The DSL ISP
can disconnect the service after a period of inactivity" (...oh yeah???..)

"There is a set-up option to keep-alive the connection" (Does not work!)
"This may not always work" (Yeah, I noticed) "If the connection is lost
again, follow steps E and F to re-establish connection" (What???) Ok,
but unacceptable to me!

I have a web server on the network inside. There is documentation on
this server that *needs* to be available and I won't stay here following
"steps E and F". Short of going back to my previous configuration (linux
box acting as a router and server), is there any way I can keep this
connection ON ?

I am thinking of a crontab entry asking to dowload a dummy something of
whatever to keep some trafic going through this router... Any suggestion
toward the best solution is most welcome... Thanks.

Gaetan

On Mon, 14 Jun 2004, Gaétan Martineau <(E-Mail Removed)> wrote:
> I happen to find out (on page 34 out of 59), after a week, why the
> router I recently bought "can stay connected". Finally. The
> documentation reads : (My connection is PPPoE, router is Linksys BEFSR41)
>
> "PPPoE is not actually a dedicated or always-on connection. The DSL ISP
> can disconnect the service after a period of inactivity" (...oh yeah???..)
>
> "There is a set-up option to keep-alive the connection" (Does not work!)
> "This may not always work" (Yeah, I noticed) "If the connection is lost
> again, follow steps E and F to re-establish connection" (What???) Ok,
> but unacceptable to me!
>
> I have a web server on the network inside. There is documentation on
> this server that *needs* to be available and I won't stay here following
> "steps E and F". Short of going back to my previous configuration (linux
> box acting as a router and server), is there any way I can keep this
> connection ON ?

Since you have a server that _needs_ to remain connected, why not use the
server (I assume Linux, subject of newsgroup) as firewall/router to
remain connected with 'persist' pppd option for pppoe. Just make sure you
keep up to date with security.

I personally just have a personal web server and mail, so I have mine set
as a demand connection and idle 0 (does not disconnect unless dropped).
But I run SETI@home, so it reconnects on demand when that exchanges work
units. Dynamic DNS (for no-ip.com) is updated automatically from
/etc/ppp/ip-up with: /usr/local/bin/noip2 -i $4

--
David Efflandt - All spam ignored http://www.de-srv.com/

David Efflandt wrote:
> Since you have a server that _needs_ to remain connected, why not use the
> server (I assume Linux, subject of newsgroup) as firewall/router to
> remain connected with 'persist' pppd option for pppoe. Just make sure you
> keep up to date with security.

Well, yes, but, in other words, this means that I made a mistake buying
this router and I should have kept my previous configuration...

> I personally just have a personal web server and mail, so I have mine set
> as a demand connection and idle 0 (does not disconnect unless dropped).
> But I run SETI@home, so it reconnects on demand when that exchanges work
> units. Dynamic DNS (for no-ip.com) is updated automatically from
> /etc/ppp/ip-up with: /usr/local/bin/noip2 -i $4

Thanks you for this information.

Gaetan

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Ga=E9tan_Martineau?= <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:

[...]

>"PPPoE is not actually a dedicated or always-on connection. The DSL ISP
>can disconnect the service after a period of inactivity" (...oh yeah???..)

True enough. PPPoE connections typically will be disconnected at least
every 24 hours. Depending on the intentions of the ISP in question,
even more often than that to free up connections.

>"There is a set-up option to keep-alive the connection" (Does not work!)
>"This may not always work" (Yeah, I noticed)

True. Some of the HW routers fail to realise that the connection
has been dropped by the ISP and therefor do not restart the PPPoE
link.

>"If the connection is lost
>again, follow steps E and F to re-establish connection" (What???) Ok,
>but unacceptable to me!

[...]

*chuckle*

Simply setup a cronjob to send out a ping to some external site once every
5 minutes or so. Other than that, if you really need a 7/24 connection
for your server, think about renting a dedicated server at a hosting
company.


Michael

Gaétan Martineau wrote:
> I am thinking of a crontab entry asking to dowload a dummy
> something of whatever to keep some trafic going through this
> router... Any suggestion toward the best solution is most
> welcome... Thanks.

Why not just ping an outside domain from the server. This would make
litle traffic an will keep the connection alive (within a second).
So ssh to your server and do a `ping www.heise.de 2>&1 > /dev/null <
/dev/null &` and your server should keep your internet connection
alive.


Mathias

Michael Buchenrieder wrote:

>>"If the connection is lost
>>again, follow steps E and F to re-establish connection" (What???) Ok,
>>but unacceptable to me!
>
>
> [...]
>
> *chuckle*
>
> Simply setup a cronjob to send out a ping to some external site once every
> 5 minutes or so. Other than that, if you really need a 7/24 connection
> for your server, think about renting a dedicated server at a hosting
> company.
>
>
> Michael
Thanks very much for the information. I put a cron job to ping 1 packet
every 5 minutes. I will then see what will happen. And, well, yes,
renting a dedicated server begins to be an interestng option to me as
from now.

Gaetan

Gaétan Martineau wrote:
>> Simply setup a cronjob to send out a ping to some external site once
>> every
>> 5 minutes or so. Other than that, if you really need a 7/24 connection
>> for your server, think about renting a dedicated server at a hosting
>> company.
>>
>>
>> Michael
>
> Thanks very much for the information. I put a cron job to ping 1 packet
> every 5 minutes. I will then see what will happen. And, well, yes,
> renting a dedicated server begins to be an interestng option to me as
> from now.

Perhaps it's easier to create a ping in the background and using its
command line parameters: "ping -i 237 -q $REMOTE_IP &".

The "-i" option specifies the interval between the ICMP-echo-requests,
"-q" makes it run in quiet mode, and giving a fixed public IP address
rather than a name will avoid DNS queries. - BTW, it doesn't matter
whether the ping is sucessful or not, You just want to generate some
traffic to keep the link from being idle and hence timing out.

Ah, and "-i 237" was just an idea to avoid even numbers in seconds or
minutes.

Using plain ping, as some other poster suggested, is not a good idea
since it will slow down Your link significantly and use up system
resources.

Personally, I put the ping commmand in "/etc/ppp/ip-down", which will
be called after a connection is terminated. Before that, there's a loop
that kills its predecessor, namely the ping that had been started upon
the last disconnection.

Depending of what sorts of services You want to provide, You may obvi-
ously be better off with a remote server. Nowadays, You can get them at
a rate that compares to Your flat rate, so what.

Again, my own experience is to have mail and http on a leased system,
and only some services hosted at home (via no-ip, coincidentally).


Cheers, Jack.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
My personal reading of the string "MicroSoft" expands to "NanoWeak"...

On Mon, 14 Jun 2004 21:27:42 -0400, Gaétan Martineau wrote:

> I happen to find out (on page 34 out of 59), after a week, why the
> router I recently bought "can stay connected". Finally. The
> documentation reads : (My connection is PPPoE, router is Linksys BEFSR41)
>
> "PPPoE is not actually a dedicated or always-on connection. The DSL ISP
> can disconnect the service after a period of inactivity" (...oh yeah???..)
>
> "There is a set-up option to keep-alive the connection" (Does not work!)
> "This may not always work" (Yeah, I noticed) "If the connection is lost
> again, follow steps E and F to re-establish connection" (What???) Ok,
> but unacceptable to me!
>
> I have a web server on the network inside. There is documentation on
> this server that *needs* to be available and I won't stay here following
> "steps E and F". Short of going back to my previous configuration (linux
> box acting as a router and server), is there any way I can keep this
> connection ON ?
>
> I am thinking of a crontab entry asking to dowload a dummy something of
> whatever to keep some trafic going through this router... Any suggestion
> toward the best solution is most welcome... Thanks.
>

As in previous responses, there are a number of ways to do this...And it
may very well help work around the problem.

As for what the issue is, have you updated the firmware on the Linksys ?

I know there were issues with some of their revisions. Also, sometimes
updating the firmware was the *cause* of the issue...If you recently
updated it, maybe try downgrading to a previous release.
And, if the Linksys is one of the wrt models ( which run linux ), there
are some modified versions of the firmware that have some enhancements
over the "stock" Linksys versions. Don't know if any of them have any
pppoe enhancements, but worth a shot.

Check out http://www.dslreports.com/forum/equip,16 for some decent
discussions on Linksys ( and other ) Broadband routers.

--
- Matt -