| [Tomato] WRT54GL slow to recognize lost connection Can I change a setting that will cause the router to recognize that the internet connection was lost by the modem and has been reconnected? Sometimes the router takes nearly five minutes to see this before it starts to authenticate PPPoE. Meanwhile nobody has internet.
After the modem connection is restored, If I click disconnect and then connect in Tomato it will come up straight away. |
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upbPremium
join:2004-03-15
Carriere, MS
kudos:1 | said by Jeff65 :
Can I change a setting that will cause the router to recognize that the internet connection was lost by the modem and has been reconnected?
Yes. You can go to Basic->Network and reduce "check interval" to something smaller than 30 seconds. I've been reasonably happy with an interval of 15 seconds, because that drops the delay in recognizing a lost connection to a minute or two. |
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 cmcasey79
join:2000-12-10
Farmington, MI
kudos:1
 ·Bright House
| reply to Jeff65
How often is your connection dropping? It sounds like quite a bit if you are getting frustrated with the router.. You might want to call your ISP and have them check your line. DSL connections these days should be very stable, and should very rarely drop a connection.
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- cmcasey79, BrightHouse Business Class (10000/1500), Farmington Hills, MI |
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upbPremium
join:2004-03-15
Carriere, MS
kudos:1 | said by cmcasey79: DSL connections these days should be very stable, and should very rarely drop a connection. It often isn't a question of a stable DSL connection, but rather of a local tech working on the equipment. When that happens, you typically get LCP (link control protocol) error messages, followed by an attempt by the firmware to log into the system again. At no time is the DSL signal actually lost.
The firmware sends a periodic query over the PPPoE link to see if the connection is still alive. If there are no responses for some predefined number of attempts, the firmware assumes it has been disconnected, and it reattempts the login.
Tomato takes a little too long to discover the disconnection, because it only checks once every 30 seconds by default. Reducing the check interval makes Tomato decide to reconnect sooner.
At my location, it is typical for AT&T techs to work on local equipment from time to time, causing connection losses once or twice per day. Once they finish whatever they are doing, the connection persists for many days. |
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| reply to upb
said by upb:You can go to Basic->Network and reduce "check interval" to something smaller than 30 seconds. This seems to set the PPPoE "redial" or retry interval after the WAN connection is discovered to be down by the router. You can see it in the logs. It doesn't seem to reduce the amount of time it takes for the router to see that the WAN is down. |
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upbPremium
join:2004-03-15
Carriere, MS
kudos:1
1 edit | said by Jeff65 :
It doesn't seem to reduce the amount of time it takes for the router to see that the WAN is down.
The only other parameters I can suggest adjusting are the non-volatile ram variables "ppp_idletime" and "pppoe_idletime". You can telnet to the router and use the commands
nvram get ppp_idletime
nvram get pppoe_idletime
to examine the current defaults (in my router they're both set to 5 pings). One source (»forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=2298) suggests reducing the value of ppp_idletime to "1" while leaving pppoe_idletime unchanged. I'd try
nvram set ppp_idletime=1
to see if that clears the problem up. Good luck.
[edit] You must restart pppoe / ppp before the nvram parameters are read and go into effect. |
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upbPremium
join:2004-03-15
Carriere, MS
kudos:1 | reply to Jeff65
I've had a chance to look into this further by examining the Tomato source code. It turns out that two nvram variables which are not accessible from the configuration page may be what you really want to adjust. They are pppoe_lei and pppoe_lef — the LCP echo interval and the number of LCP echo failures respectively. They control the "-I" and "-T" option switch values that are provided to pppoecd when it is started by Tomato. The default values of "-I 30" and "-T 5" cause pppoe to wait for 2.5 minutes before it decides that the pppoe session has been lost.
I've tested the command "nvram set pppoe_lef=2", and it does indeed reduce the wait time to one minute under the conditions of an unresponsive ppp connection. The wait time can obviously be reduced further by changing pppoe_lei to something smaller than 30 seconds. By the way, the "nvram show" and "nvram get ..." commands may not show any values for those two variables at first. When the values are null, the Tomato firmware supplies the default values instead. |
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