Ever since I have moved into my new house, my dsl has been flakey. At
first I thought it to be a telco problem since I had zero trouble with
the hardware at my old location. I have reason to believe that my modem
is losing sync at random and it comes back quick enough that the WAN
interface on m0n0wall doesn't realize it dropped. The interface shows up
in m0n0wall when this happens. The fix that I have tried has been
rebooting the modem. I have had 5 tickets open with the telco in the
last 3 weeks and they refuse to do anything stating that this is not
their problem(typical....) Early yesterday it went down and when I
realized, I power cycled m0n0wall to see if it would come back. It did.
That leads me to believe that somewhere between the modem and m0n0wall(a
cat5 cable and a network card) is where the problem lies. I'm guessing
the loss of signal on the card by rebooting the modem brought it back
and thus, why rebooting the modem worked. Before switching to m0n0wall,
I was using plain old freebsd and had the same trouble. I liked the GUI
for m0n0wall so I kept it. I am waiting for the dsl to die again so that
I can run another test. Any ideas as to why m0n0wall would just let that
interface hang like that. Possibly a bad network card or cable? I have
tinkered with the idea of getting a modem that will do the PPPoE and
pass everything onto m0n0wall, that way, the m0n0wall interface
technically never drops since it is connected to the modem and if the
PPPoE drops, the modem will redial it for me. I had the Dial on Demand
option checked and have unchecked it to see if that makes a difference
as well. I will also be upgrading to the latest version of m0n0wall on
Friday afternoon or so. Any suggestions or ideas are greatly
appreciated.
 
Andrew