pfSense: 1.2.3-RC1 embedded
h/w: Alix
ADSL Modem: Vigor 100
WAN type: PPPoE (dialondemand/idletimeout/periodicreset all unticked/blank)

- All working fine for months, but for past 3 wks loses link roughly every 2-3 days.
- By 'losing link' what I mean is no Internet connectivity for LAN clients (eg can't ping 4.2.2.2)
- Once it's in this state, WAN (vr2) shows in GUI as:

    Ststus: up
    PPPoE: up [disconnect]  <- pfSense thinks link is still up!?

Hitting 'Disconnect' then 'Connect' brings everything back to normal... for 2-3 days then back in loop ;-(

I should point out that my customers ISP (BT in UK) informed them that 'they would be doing some line work, but it won't affect you...' just prior to this all starting.  Very suspicious, but I just KNOW the onus is now on me (from my customer and their ISP) to prove it's not my pfSense/Vigor100 hardware.

Before I start doing things like replacing Alix/Vigor with fresh units, might there be something in a log somewhere that might shed some light.  I've looked in /var/log/system.log and it shows something similar to this:

Point A (eg 9am Sun)
   ... reams of normal stuff...
Point B (eg 10pm Mon) - details of say a PPTP VPN connect from me
   ... nothing, at least that appears relevant to this issue ...
Point C (eg 9am Tue) - details of my vr2 disconnect/connect from cust room when they called me!
   ... goto A

In other words there appears to be nothing much in the log between everything being fine and me having to do a WAN disconnect/reconnect.  It's as if pfSense is completely unaware that there is (or has been) a break in the link.

Due to the 2-3 lag time between events, this looks like it might be very time consuming to resolve.  Thanks in advance for any ideas that might lead to a speedy resolution.

Sorted.  The above only happens when the clients are connecting from the same WAN IP so I guess this is closely related to the outgoing PPTP issue that's well documented.  Multiple clients can connect through my pfsense firewall - as long as they have different source WAN IPs.  So, a restriction, but not nearly as bad as I thought.


ianb

Quoting from the main pfsense info page:

"If you use PPTP VPN connections, only one internal machine can connect simultaneously to a PPTP server on the Internet. A thousand machines can connect simultaneously to a thousand different PPTP servers, but only one simultaneously to a single server."

Not ideal, but very clear.  I might be missing something here, but I'm having a similar issue with incoming PPTP connections from machines out there PPTP'ing IN to my network!  In short, any XP/Vista/Win7 client can connect to the network behind my main pfsense firewall and everything works perfectly.  Problem happens when a second client attempts to connect while the first is still connected.  I get:

  "Error 619: A connection to the remote computer could not be established...."   

Maybe this is also a known issue, but why then would the VPN:PPTP:Config screen show MaxConcurrentConnections to be 16!  Just in case I've made a schoolboy error, here is my pfsense PPTP config info:

  Max. concurrent connections -> 16 
  Server address -> 192.168.101.254
  Remote address range 192.168.101.192 / 28

Any ideas?  I have tgo be missing something very very obvious here.


Regards
Ian