Nightly Drop?

I've happily been on Zen's FTTC product for over a year now. However, on most evenings around 11PM I notice that the connection will drop for 30-60 seconds. If I look on my router's connection information during this time, I can see that it has no IPv4 or IPv6 addresses. I don't need to manually intervene for the connection to come back again, it happens automatically.

It always appears to happen around this time, rather than based on the uptime of my router or modem. This is the only time of day that I experience a drop too. It doesn't happen every single night, but it does happen most nights and can be rather frustrating as it can often interrupt things.

I can't find any hints to what may be causing this on Zen's portal. My line has had the same 80001 sync rate for almost a year now so it doesn't seem like a line quality issue.

Any ideas? Would be nice to be able to resolve this.

Thanks in advance.

Like most if not all ISPs, Zen drop PPP sessions sometimes for load balancing or maintenance purposes. However, a 30-60 second outage sounds more like one end determining from a failure of LCP echo request/reply (like a ping, but at a lower layer of the protocol stack) that the link has failed before tearing it down and re-establishing it.


Unfortunately, I can't get any meaningful PPP session data out of my recent logs, because there are numerous outages over the past fortnight relating to me changing one of the two main network switches here, as well as some debugging and development work on the PPPoE functionality of the pfSense firewall I use.

I've added RFC 4638 support to pfSense, so I'm now running with a MTU of 1500. I have also made pfSense re-establish DHCP-PD on a linkdown -> linkup transition, as Zen's trial IPv6 service requires you to delegate the prefix before a route is installed for your IPv6 /48 block.

Thanks for the suggestions David. I'm using OpenWRT for this (alas, i'd love to have pfSense fronting it!). Unfortunately, I don't have any logs from around the time either, as it's all syslogged to a remote server over a VPN tunnel, which notably doesn't work well when the connection drops, and OpenWRT's local cache of logs doesn't go back very far.

I'll see if I can get the logs stored locally around the time of disconnect tonight. Maybe they'll offer some insight!

Ask Zen tech support for a copy of the radius graph showing sync/ppp drops for your connection - this will show if there is a regular pattern to the connection drops.

Hello,

There could be a number of different reasons for the drop - if you could send me your account and contact details in a private message I'll pass them straight over to tech support who can look into it for you.

Thank you,

Erin

I've dropped Erin a PM with my account details, and update this thread for future reference with any insights!

Since posting this, my connection was stable for a few days, but I experienced another drop around 11PM on the 16th. Unfortunately, I couldn't capture any logs.