Hey all,
This is probably a very easy one for folks here. It’s been quite some time since I’ve done anything professionally but I was for a long time. Basically, for a while, my systems have experienced intermittent issue that for approximately 30 seconds, can’t get any WAN activity. I can still communicate with other systems within my network. - this is a home situation. The only thing that changed sort of around when this started was I configured my two access points as a mesh - pseudo, since they’re not actually mesh technically. Like, I just made same SSIDs, but different channels. This way I could get around and my devices would hop. And it’s worked nicely. Only issue has been occasionally a device tries to hang on desperately which I know is like the most common problem, but I am gonna play with signal strength if the APs support modifying that.
Anyway, I’m getting off topic. But yeah, that was the only thing that changed but I really think it’s just a coincidence. It’s definitely not the wifi itself because the problem occurred on a wired machine as well.
My setup is I have the cable device in bridge mode and I have a Sonicwall as my router. I also have a site-to-site VPN with another Sonicwall at a remote location for a variety of purposes. That setup has been on and stable for like 15 years almost, and it’s fine.
So, really my first idea is I want to run software that can continually test the connection for like 12 hours, and log when the connection goes down and for how long. Obviously I thought of just running a ping, but I wanted to know if there’s anything that will try varying destinations over time, and track the results so I can analyze for more than just how long and when. Also I don’t know if some servers might misconstrue a persistent ping for many hours as a possible DDoS bot and knock me off, so I figured varying the destination has the added benefit of making sure the test is as reliable as possible.
If I’m gonna figure out what’s wrong, and if it’s the cable device I want to be able to just tell level 2 support my results so they’ll just swap it out quickly.
Anyway, sorry for long post but I imagine they come much longer here sometimes. If anyone has ideas as far as having seen this kind of thing, and also if there’s any FOSS software I could run to test and analyze. I prefer something easy please :-). I’d like to run the tests on two systems concurrently to see how they compare. I’ve got a windows 7 machine and a Linux machine. The Linux is on WiFi and the Win is wired.
Also if this doesn’t belong here, I apologize; it looked kosher according to the sidebar.
Thanks folks.
P.S. oooh also, if there’s an app for Android that can join the test as well, I’d love that. I have piles of Android devices so I would like to see how they fair, as well.
The thing I like for this purpose is smokeping. It checks basic connectivity on a periodic schedule and records latency over time. I keep it pointed at my isp’s gateway as well as a number of public sites and services I run to keep tabs on basic network health and to try to pinpoint where issues come from.
Thank you! I’ll check it out. Much appreciated.
I can run it on the Linux machine and on the Win box I can run it in a VM, of which I have quite a few :-)
Simplest way would be to just write a Python program
Have you checked out Uptime Kuma? Open source containerized app that you can set up to do all kinds of continuous connectivity checks. It integrates with over a dozen different notification services and is really simple and intuitive to set up and use.
You can control how many attempts it takes to reestablish connectivity and how long to wait before alerting you that it’s down. Everything is charted and logged too, so you can see an uptime percentage right in the app per connection endpoint.
Might not be exactly what you’re looking for, but it’s still a great app to have in your home lab environment either way.
Will definitely look at it, thanks.
Does this happen on wired or just wireless? Does it still happen if you disable or change one of the APs?
As stated in my post, it happens both wired and wifi. When I run the test, I will schedule disconnect of one of the access points for a period to see whether the problem disappears.
