Info regarding "WAN dies"

[Cantara]

I opened a new thread to discuss this because the original thread is already too big and confusing.

For almost Emule/Edonkey users had already noticed that sometimes your internet connection dies without a 'logic' explanation. The connection simply dies, and after a while (or when you make release/renew on you router) the connection is again established.
By reading the thread, I think I can suppose that this happens when we have a high number of simultaneous connections, and the router simply can't handle them.

I was reading the EmulePlus FAQ, when I found this important information:

Sleepy's router guide v0.3

The following is about how to set up eMule itself when using a router, this is important so do not ignore it.

Most routers use a 16 bit address code for calculating the connections, this results in a maximum amount of connections of 256, normally this would not be a problem. But when using eMule it can be a problem, since eMule usually requires as much connections as it can get.

The max connections can be set in the connection tab in the preferences menu, without a router this can be set to about 300 to 500 on a windows 2000/XP system (less than 90 on a windows 95/98/ME system because of the bad networking system in these versions).
A router uses a special chip to arrange connections, this chip has limitations!
When using a router you have to keep an eye on this, I advise setting this to around 200 and not very much higher because if the router has to many connections it can crash(will need a reboot then) or stop making new connections. This means no more web browsing or getting email and things like that because these connections can not be made by the router.

Most routers suffer from this problem.

Examples; Linksys routers, Alcatel routers (especially the 510i and the speedtouch PRO versions) Netgear routers, some cable modems even suffer from this problem.

When you set the max. connections lower, to 200 do not set max sources per file to high, otherwise it will keep looking for sources and forget to keep an eye on sources where you can download from. Set these to 400 when downloading 5 or less files, to 300 when downloading 5 to 12 files and with more then 12 files set it to 250 or even 200. These settings can be found in the Files tab in the preferences window.
eMulePlus is a very smart little mule, very uncommon for mules but it comes in handy, if you can get more sources than those that you already have emule will discard the useless sources slowly and let fresh sources in.

The last setting to set is the Max. connections per 5 seconds, routers with a faster processor(yes every router has it's own processor) can handle more connections per 5 seconds, I recommend setting this to 30. If you think your router can handle more, then gradually increase this value until you notice slower internet and failing to load web pages.

So, if this information is correct, the Asus WL500g is OK and the problem consists in too many connections at the same time. If you are an Emule/EmulePlus/Edonkey.... use this tips to configure the program to not overload your connection!

I hope this info helps you!

[Snigel]

Too bad that this issue also is when high speed is going through wan with one connection :/

[Antiloop]

what is high speed in your opinion?
i can receive without problems 4gb (saved to the usb harddisk directly) at my line

but i only have a 2,5MBit connection for download..

[Snigel]

Well, I have things a bit strange connected, so it's actually both internet and lan from some other computer coming through wan.

My internet is 10mbit, that's not the real problem. But it dies really fast if I try to send something at 100mbit.

My connection looks like this:

Server -> Router ->
-------------------------> Switch -> Adsl-modem
Laptop+Workstation ->

I don't know if my internet can kill the connection, some guy here said earlier in this thread that 10mbit could kill his line, just that it took longer time than 100mbit.

[Oleg]

Do you send it using wired LAN or WLAN? Once your WAN port "dies" do you've an access to wl500g?

[Snigel]

Yup, my wl500g is connected via the wanport to a switch. So it accesses both the rest of my network and internet throug wan.

[Oleg]

I mean, when it dies do you use wl500g LAN (wired) or WLAN (wireless) port?

[gscherpenzeel]

I've got the WL-500g too. But my problem with the dieing WAN port is different then yours. I've got an FTP Server on one of my clients connected through a wired connection. Recently I've moved to another city and returned my old Chello Cable Modem (a COM21 modem with static IP) to UPC. Now I've got a Motorola Surfboard modem with dynamic IP. In the old situation I never have had any kind of problems with a dieing WAN port. Lots of gigabytes of data were transferred between FXP.

A few days ago a friend of my transferred a DVD iso through FXP to my FTP server. Suddenly the connections drops out. Cutting of the router from the power and putting it back in, the router resets and the connection is up again. But after a few random amount of minutes the router drops out again. Still my LAN and WLAN connections are up.

The things I've tried to solve the problem are:

• Assinging a static IP
• Set the number of threads to FTP to 1
• Resetted the Modem

but nothing helps.

So with this information, I want to let you see that it's not the Emule thing only, nor the number of connections.
I think the problem relies in the combination with a WL-500g and the Motorola Surfboard and a sudden amount of data?

[Antiloop]

I've got the WL-500g too. But my problem with the dieing WAN port is different then yours. I've got an FTP Server on one of my clients connected through a wired connection. Recently I've moved to another city and returned my old Chello Cable Modem (a COM21 modem with static IP) to UPC. Now I've got a Motorola Surfboard modem with dynamic IP. In the old situation I never have had any kind of problems with a dieing WAN port. Lots of gigabytes of data were transferred between FXP.

A few days ago a friend of my transferred a DVD iso through FXP to my FTP server. Suddenly the connections drops out. Cutting of the router from the power and putting it back in, the router resets and the connection is up again. But after a few random amount of minutes the router drops out again. Still my LAN and WLAN connections are up.

The things I've tried to solve the problem are:

• Assinging a static IP
• Set the number of threads to FTP to 1
• Resetted the Modem

but nothing helps.

So with this information, I want to let you see that it's not the Emule thing only, nor the number of connections.
I think the problem relies in the combination with a WL-500g and the Motorola Surfboard and a sudden amount of data?

i think you are suffering the 10/100 autosense problem, when this occurs go into the www setup, renew the IP for wan from the status page then your connection will be up again

e.g. I own a terayon modem which does not have autosense (runs at 10/half), no lockup of my wan ever occured

[Nominus]

I have found some kind of solution - add the folowing line
/bin/watch -n 60 /usr/sbin/et -i eth1 speed auto &
into the /usr/local/init/post-boot and do flashfs save, flashfs commit, flashfs enable (as it's described at http://wl500g.dyndns.org) and reboot the router. After that every 60 seconds your router will test the connection for speed rate and will restore it.....

Or better you can make a script like this:
#!/bin/sh
ping -q -c 1 your_gate_IP > /dev/null
if [ $? -ne 0 ]; then
/usr/sbin/et -i eth1 speed auto
fi
place it in /usr/local/bin and watch it instead of "/usr/sbin/et -i eth1 speed auto" directly.

I know this is very ugly and unnatural solution but it works...

[Oleg]

So, could you confirm, that knocking et with "speed auto" fix the problem?

[Nominus]

So, could you confirm, that knocking et with "speed auto" fix the problem?

Yes, I could confirm that it solves the problem of dying WAN port during high speed (3-4 Mb/s) FTP transfer... at least WAN port restores quick enouth. But the better way is not to knock, but to test (ping) connection before do "et -i eth1 speed auto" as i described earlier.

[Oleg]

ok. we've made similar findings with Antiloop.
Can you please check that

ifconfig eth1 w.x.y.z

also helps (w.x.y.z is the current IP address, assigned to wl500g, including 0.0.0.0 if you use pppoe).
"speed auto" thing is doing to much, it's to hard to isolate problem.

[Oleg]

And another thing - try just this instead of speed auto, once your port is dead

et -i eth1 up

and if it does not help, try

et -i eth1 speed auto

Post results here.
Also, I need results of command below before & after each et command (wait a bit after each command execution, so things stabilize)

for a in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30; do echo -n "$a:$(et -i eth1 phyrd $a) "; done; echo

Everyone is invited.
So, the sequence should be as follows. Once you port died, telnet to router and copy/paste these lines

nslookup www.google.com
for a in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30; do echo -n "$a:$(et -i eth1 phyrd $a) "; done; echo
et -i eth1 up
sleep 2s
nslookup www.google.com
sleep 5s
for a in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30; do echo -n "$a:$(et -i eth1 phyrd $a) "; done; echo

Copy the results here. Check your connection - if it's alive, don't do anything, otherwise copy/paste this

et -i eth1 speed auto
sleep 2s
nslookup www.google.com
sleep 5s
for a in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30; do echo -n "$a:$(et -i eth1 phyrd $a) "; done; echo

Check your connection again.

[Nominus]

Yes, `ifconfig eth1 10.0.2.7 broadcast 10.0.2.255` restores WAN port, but it breaks default gateway record in the routing table, so i have to do `route add default gw 10.0.2.1` to restore it (10.0.2.7 - WAN IP, 10.0.2.1 - gate's IP).

btw, i've noticed that the router sets broadcast adress wrong - 10.255.255.255 instead of 10.0.2.255 (my mask is 255.255.255.0) and i have found no way to set it properly in the Web-interface, only by typing`ifconfig eth1 10.0.2.7 broadcast 10.0.2.255 mask 255.255.255.0` directly.

and i did as you had asked:

~ # nslookup www.google.com
*** Unknown host

nslookup: www.google.com: Unknown host
~ # for a in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30; do echo -n "$a:$(et -i eth1 phyrd $a) "; done; echo
0:0x3000 1:0x786d 2:0x0022 3:0x5521 4:0x01e1 5:0x45e1 6:0x0007 7:0x2801 16:0x1800 17:0x006d 18:0x0f90 19:0x0000 20:0xc0b0 21:0x0003 22:0x0fdf 23:0x8001 24:0xb65c 28:0x0044 29:0x1000 30:0x3a60
~ # et -i eth1 up
~ # sleep 2s
~ # nslookup www.google.com
*** Unknown host

nslookup: www.google.com: Unknown host
~ # sleep 5s
~ # for a in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30; do echo -n "$a:$(et -i eth1 phyrd $a) "; done; echo
0:0x3000 1:0x786d 2:0x0022 3:0x5521 4:0x01e1 5:0x45e1 6:0x0005 7:0x2801 16:0x1800 17:0x0000 18:0x0e99 19:0x0000 20:0xc0b0 21:0x0003 22:0x0fdf 23:0x8001 24:0x4abf 28:0x0044 29:0x1000 30:0x3a60
~ # et -i eth1 speed auto
~ # sleep 2s
~ # nslookup www.google.com
Server: gate2.maryno.yes
Address: 10.0.2.1

Name: www.google.akadns.net
Address: 216.239.59.147
~ # sleep 5s
~ # for a in 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 28 29 30; do echo -n "$a:$(et -i eth1 phyrd $a) "; done; echo
0:0x3000 1:0x786d 2:0x0022 3:0x5521 4:0x01e1 5:0x45e1 6:0x0007 7:0x2801 16:0x1800 17:0x006d 18:0x0f90 19:0x0000 20:0xc0b0 21:0x0002 22:0x0fdf 23:0x8001 24:0xb65c 28:0x0044 29:0x1000 30:0x3a60
~ #

I think nslookup isn't a good choice to test the connection, cos timeout is *TOO* long, imho `ping -c 1 host` is much better.