Plusnet blaming me for extreme packet loss

rafspeik · 25 Sep 2021 at 17:20

Hi all. Been a lurker for a long time, posting now since I could do with some input on this issue!

At my mothers home I have a DrayTek Vigor 130 modem running into pfSense (latest ver).

After Plusnet's national outage on the morning of the 22nd, I've been seeing huge packet loss and outages lasting anything between almost 14 hours and a matter of minutes.

Plusnet sent out an Openreach engineer this morning who reported he was unable to find an issue, suggesting it could be the fact that our 'router' (referring to the DrayTek) is inside a metal cabinet.
I'm wondering if he thought it was a modem+router+AP unit, leading to the suggestion that it shouldn't be in a metal cabinet since that could cause issues with RF.
Regardless, I see this as a non-issue since that is not the case.

I've updated the modem to the latest firmware as a precaution, rebooted it and pfSense, and re-plugged everything between the master socket and pfSense.
No luck.

VDSL status from the DrayTek:

In pfSense's PPP logs I see nothing incredibly useful, just a lot of reconnects.

Any ideas would be hugely appreciated.
Cheers.

whitecrook · 25 Sep 2021 at 17:35

Setup a broadband monitor to ping your connection. Google broadband monitor. Thinkbroadband

i had a problem with pfsense and virgin and consistently low level pl. theres threads about it. Something to do with the virgin router. Anyway I switched to a zyxel firewall from pfsense and it cured the problem. Maybe a similar thing ?

rafspeik · 25 Sep 2021 at 17:41

Cheers, I've been pulling stats from the gateway monitor in pfSense every 15 seconds or so and am graphing the packet loss in Grafana.

The problem is really that Openreach/Plusnet are acknowledging the issue but claiming they're faultless, leaving it down to me to prove the fault isn't mine before they will do anything more.

bremen1874 · 25 Sep 2021 at 17:45

Temporarily use the router they supplied you with and see if problems still occur. If it's happening as much as your opening post suggests it shouldn't take long to find out.

rafspeik · 25 Sep 2021 at 17:55

Slight problem there... I don't have it anymore! I have some spare third-party routers I can try, so that'll have to be the next-best option.
I'm also a fair distance from my mother's home, so this is especially painful to work through since access to my systems on-premise is intermittent at best.

I think at this point I've ruled out all points of configuration to check/change/re-check, unless anyone has any other ideas, so I may have to make the trip down there to do some further troubleshooting. Nightmare!

rafspeik · 26 Sep 2021 at 14:19

Well, frustratingly but thankfully, it seems to have calmed down just as I took the trip down there. I did nothing that should've affected it last night since by the time I arrived it was looking fine.
I prepared a spare router to be connected up should it start happening again, but until it does there's little else I can do.

Perhaps, after 3.5 days of >70% average packet loss and total outages, it picked the moment I decided to drive down to resolve itself :rolleyes:

Avalon · 1 Oct 2021 at 08:43

whitecrook said:
Setup a broadband monitor to ping your connection. Google broadband monitor. Thinkbroadband

i had a problem with pfsense and virgin and consistently low level pl. theres threads about it. Something to do with the virgin router. Anyway I switched to a zyxel firewall from pfsense and it cured the problem. Maybe a similar thing ?

At one point pf had a specific issue with VM.

Op: Have you done the obvious thing and tried the Plusnet router to see if it provides stability? If it does you know it’s a you issue, if it doesn’t, back to Plusnet to investigate it again. Normally things don’t randomly fix themselves unfortunately

rafspeik · 1 Oct 2021 at 12:35

Thanks, Avalon. Oddly it seems to have levelled out and stabilised now. Seems to have been a long-lasting one-off. Weird, but I'm not complaining!

otester · 1 Oct 2021 at 12:42

Another option is just leave PlusNet, they're garbage anyways.

WJA96 · 2 Oct 2021 at 08:14

otester said:
Another option is just leave PlusNet, they're garbage anyways.

But for the money, which of them isn’t?

We’re not talking A&A here. Even Zen aren’t what they used to be (although still better than BT/EE/TalkTalk/PlusNet etc.)

They’re all fine until you have a problem, which is usually not very often. So they get away with having terrible customer service and support.

Eurofighter · 3 Oct 2021 at 05:57

If it is dropping ppp connection rather than just packet loss then it is logged at their side. It probably just didn't lose sync while the engineer was there which is what openreach are looking for. Make sure it's open as an intermittent fault.

blueboy2001 · 3 Oct 2021 at 15:22

The FE CRC and FE ES counts both look high - these are indicative of data corruption between the modem and the DSLAM on the upstream (FE = far end).

If it really has righted itself then the most likely cause is DLM has detected it and it has lowered the sync speed to increase the SNR margin - improving the signal to noise ratio can reduce or eliminate corruption. The Openreach line test presumably must have picked something up for them to send an engineer though, so it’s a little odd that it just sorted itself out. Anything can happen with old copper connections though.