> Still, I am having trouble understanding what you wrote. It *appears* that
> you are saying that when an outage occurs, you *can* ping the ISP's
gateway
> from the LEAF router, but you *cannot* ping it from a LAN client. I get
> that from this combination of responses:
<snip>
> Now I may still be minunderstanding you ... but this part is important to
> get exactly right. Specifically, during an outage, can the router itself
> ping the ISP's gateway?

Sorry, my response was sloppy on that point. When the connection is down,
the internal clients can ping the router's internal IP (the "internal"
gateway - eth1) but cannot ping the ISP's gateway (the internal clients can
also ping the external NIC - eth0). I don't think the router can ping the
ISP's gateway either, but I'll double-check on Monday (I have SSH disabled
so I don't have remote access).

> If is can, but the LAN clients cannot, then the problem lies somewhere in
> the interaction between the LAN clients and the LEAF router. Where? Well,
> the fact that the clients do not lose contect with the router itself (or,
I
> presume, one another) rules out a lot of possibilities on the LAN side
> (including failure of the eth1 interface). If the ISP can regularly ping
> the router's external interface, that rules out any problems at that end
> (including failure of the eth0 interface).

>From my understanding of what the ISP was doing, they were pinging the cable
modem rather than the external interface (eth0). I'll double check this with
them on Monday.

> Almost the only thing in between these two interfaces is the Linux kernel
> itself -- most directly its iptables ruleset, as configured by Shorewall.
> I'm no Shorewall expert, so I'll leave it to Tom to suggest any
> possibilities here. All I can think to suggest is that you examine your
> logs (in /var/log/) for any kernel messages from iptables.

Thanks, I'll check the log files on Monday too.

> OTOH, if I have misunderstood you and  the router *cannot* ping the ISP's
> gateway at these times, then we need to understand why your ISP thinks it
> *can* ping you. On that score ... if we are talking about close-by pings,
> the 1% packet loss the ISP reports seeing is quite a lot. A system with
> negligible packet loss normally, and 3 5-minute outages during a day,
would
> *average* 1% packet loss over the day.  So I hope the ISP was doing a more
> exact test than this summary conveys. (I mention this concern because I
> have way too much experience with ISP sloppiness to trust ambiguous
replies
> from ISPs.)

Agreed. He said he had been pinging all day and averaged 1% loss.

> More to the point, what is he pinging? Your external IP address (the one
on
> the LEAF router)? If so, is his experience consistent with yours -- that
> is, if he pings you, and no other traffic is running, do the RX and TX
> packet count increase on the external interface? Or does the ISP ping some
> address on the interface it provides (the cable modem itself)? If that
> device has an IP address, can the router ping it?

These are all great questions. I wish I had SSH enabled so I could check,
but I'll have to wait until Monday. Regarding the RX and TX packet counts:
Forgive my ignorance with regard to LEAF, but how do I do this? With Red
Hat, I use ifconfig, but that's not on my LEAF disk. The only thing close I
could find was ifupdown. Can that be used? I also use ifconfig in Red Hat to
check for errors on the network interfaces and would like to be able to do
that with LEAF, if possible.

> Even more to the point, where is the ISP pinging *from*? Get the IP
address
> of the machine the ISP is using to do the ping test, then see if you can
> ping *it* (from the router) next time you have a failure. If you can, then
> the problem lies in the ISP"s gateway machine, specifically its connection
> to the network your LEAF router is on.

Will do. Thanks for the great suggestions and pointing me in the right
direction. I'll update you on Monday.

-sr

> At 07:23 PM 9/20/02 -0700, sr wrote:
> >Thanks for the reply, Ray. Below are my reponses to your questions.
> [details deleted]
>
>
> --
> -------------------------------------------"Never tell me the
odds!"--------
> Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
> Palo Alto, California, USA   [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> --------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
>




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