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WAN keeps going down

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John Harrold

My current setup is that I have a gold pro with two WAN connections. I have fiber connection through AT&T that is my primary and Starlink that I use as a failover/backup connection. On or before July 21st I started getting messages that the AT&T connection was down and it had switched over to Starlink. It would normally come back up a couple minutes later. This would happen 4-7 times an hour. 

So I made my primary connection Starlink and AT&T the backup. I don't have this problem with Starlink. So I assumed it was something to do with my AT&T connection.  I tried the following to resolve this but none has fixed the problem:

* I rebooted the firewalla
* Changing the network cable
* Swapping the WAN ports on the firewalla
* Rebooting/resetting the AT&T fiber gateway
* I got a new fiber gateway from AT&T

I just installed the new gateway and had the same problem. Next I connected to the AT&T gateway through wifi on my computer and started pinging 1.1.1.1 and google.com. When the firewalla (connected through ethernet) said the connection was disconnected I still had access through the wifi and could successfully ping the entire time. 

So I think there is a problem with the firewalla. Can anyone give me some ideas on how I can prevent these disconnections?

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    Firewalla
    • Edited

    If you still have internet access after firewalla detect it as down, likely one of the test targets is not behaving.

    What you can do to identify this is, tap on the down event, and you should see exact reason why firewalla consider you link down. It can be DNS failure or ping failure. If you see ping failure (most like), change the target to say 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8, see https://help.firewalla.com/hc/en-us/articles/4413511352083-Network-Performance-and-Quality-Monitoring#h_01GPX4GXBARCYJDC2JV9AD4KK6 (you need to scroll down a few paragraphs)

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    John Harrold

    Ah. I see. So it looks like it's a github.com DNS failure. Do I just change that to something like google.com?

     

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    Firewalla

    First, that shouldn't fail. Are you using any filtering DNS? or at a place that like to filter DNS?

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    John Harrold

    Honestly it worked fine until a little over a week ago and then just started failing. It doesn't happen for the Starlink connection. It only happens on the AT&T connection. I'm not using anything beyond what is in the firewalla box in terms of services. If there is anything about my configuration that would be helpful I can pull that out and put it here.  

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    Firewalla

    What you can do is set your WAN DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 and not use ISP default. 

    Github is a big site and shouldn't fail on DNS lookups ... if it did, then your DNS server is likely not very good or filtering something 

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    John Harrold

    I've looked through and I cannot see the option to sent the DNS servers. 
    Primary and secondary DNS from AT&T are: 68.94.156.8 and  68.94.157.8. I don't think I can change them. 

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    John Harrold

    I may be misunderstanding this but there is an IP Passthrough option. If I set that to the firewalla will it just use the default DNS server options on the firewalla? Sorry if this is a really daft question. 

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    John Harrold

    Same thing with google (as you probably guessed). The passthrough option doesn't do anything either. I just set it to empty to bypass the test. 

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    Firewalla

    Tap on "network button"

    Tap on "WAN"

    Tap top right "edit" button

    Then scroll down, you will see "Primary DNA Server", change that to 1.1.1.1 and your Secondary to 8.8.8.8

     

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    John Harrold

    It looks like this worked. Thank you.

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    Firewalla

    Great! It is strange to see that ATT DNS is not resolving github.com 

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    adam.d.hunt

    I’ve been having the same challenge with ATT fiber: I wasn’t sure if it was due to the configuration of the fiber to the apartment building and then coax to the apartment. It looks like this has resolved my issue as well

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    John Harrold

    I'm glad you posted this because I thought it was something I was doing wrong :). I'm also glad it helped you.

    I swapped out everything (cables, fiber modem, etc) before I found the problem. I was using Starlink for 3 weeks because every time it would switch back and forth my video conferences would pause for like 5-10 seconds.

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