Smoothwall Issue

Soldato
Joined
30 Dec 2003
Posts
5,770
Location
London
I have a Mini-ITX box (500Mhz VIA, 2 VIA 100Mbps LAN ports) connected to the network and connected to an X-Modem CE.

Occasionally the internet dies. Smoothwall still says it's connected on the web interface. Delving into 'advanced' yields something similar to this:

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:40:63:DA:93:FE
UP BROADCAST NOTRAILERS RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:8065 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:8542 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000
RX bytes:4247364 (4.0 Mb) TX bytes:2934805 (2.7 Mb)
Interrupt:11 Base address:0xe800

usually you'd see a second line with:

inet addr:195.x.x.x Bcast:255.255.255.255 Mask:255.255.255.0

But that seems to vanish. Rebooting the box doesn't usually help, I have to turn the modem off and on again, and then reboot the box.

Would this lead you to the conclusion that the modem is at fault here? Any ideas what might be the problem?

I suppose I could just buy one of the new X-Modem M3's and see if that helped... but it could be a waste of money if that's not the issue.
 
I decided to do a brief test... when it dropped out again, i unplugged the modem's ethernet cable and put it in my laptop. It just sat there saying 'Acquiring Network Address'. Nothing else happened for the time I left it (2 mins or so).

Restarting the modem gave it an IP immediately (local) and then renewed again when the connection was up.

Seems like the modem's problem then. Still not sure why though.
 
Yep, I suppose that could be it could it?

The modem itself isn't doing any NAT or anything that I'd've thought would be affected by multiple connections. And just checking the torrent client, there's nothing downloading/uploading at the moment. Not sure if any of my housemates are doing anything, but I suspect not.

Sometimes it can go for a few days without crashing on me, whereas this evening it's done it 2 or 3 times already. I'm fairly sure it never did this the whole of last year...
 
if theres a whole house of you running peer to peer that might be the answer.

or try and get a new modem off your isp in case yours in faulty.
 
The modem was bought by me, and it's a couple of years old now.

I was reading through some posts on the support forums, and one person complains of their modem locking up occasionally due to p2p. They also note that their D-Link DSL-300T doesn't do that, so I may see if I can get my hands on one of them.
 
Yeah someone beat me to it - your modem probably can't cope with the number of connections - do you have it set up in NAT mode or Half-bridge mode?

Half bridge is better than having 2 separate subnets on the smoothbox (Do you have a 'real' ip address on the side connected to the modem (red) or private one? You mention 195 - did you mean 192?

If you have a real IP it's probably set up OK. You shouldn't need to reboot the box. Just restart networking (probably in a control panel somewhere) failing that ssh in and do a /etc/init.d/networking restart as root and that will fix it.
 
It is 195 - that's our public IP. I'm fairly sure it's set up correctly.

There isn't an option to restart networking, and the networking script in /etc/rc.d/init.d/rc.networking doesn't appear to have a restart option... but re-running it might help. I'm looking into a quicker way of doing this at the moment... but my linux experience is slightly limited.
 
hmm after reading : http://www.adslguide.org.uk/hardware/reviews/2004/q4/dlink-dsl300t.asp I see at the bottom about the X-Modem I didn't notice that before (the ip address thing is what i was talking about before).

Maybe it could be configuration on the PC. I used smoothwall many years ago and it was fine, but maybe try out something like moonwall, clark connect, ipcop (simliar to smoothwall) instead - it' not like they take long to install. if you have a spare hd just whap it in and test out a new distro.
 
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