I recently installed a Flint 2 Router for my home network because my old TP Link AC1750 kept having an issue where the WAN would drop and require a router restart to recover (and on that unit, that meant that I couldn't even reach LAN targets or get to the admin page).
It's been good so far, and the Flint 2 even managed to self-recover when the WAN dropped once, but yesterday I had a very similar issue where the Flint lost WAN and the only way I could recover was to reboot the router (it was down for hours and then as soon as it rebooted it was fine). The admin page said the interface was plugged in but didn't have internet access. It's plugged in to a TC4400 modem and all the lights on that were looking good - I did not reboot the modem. I rebooted via the admin page, not with a power cycle.
I've since read that watchcat can help with this issue, so I've installed it and set up to ping Google DNS every 30 seconds, rebooting if it can't reach it for 5 minutes. I also saw there was an option to just restart the interface, so I've set up at restart of eth1 of Google DNS can't be reached for 2 minutes.
I have a few questions I was hoping for guidance on:
I've seen other posts talking about this issue, but no definite resolution apart from using watchcat. Is it the best way to address this or is there other troubleshooting I could do that might find the root cause? I don't understand why rebooting was necessary to get the router to recognize WAN was available, and whatever it is, it seems to not be isolated to a specific router. Could there be something going on upstream in the modem, refusing to connect the router until it reboots?
Does my watchcat config sound reasonable? Is there a benefit to restarting just the interface or should I just have the reboot rule? I'm not knowledgable enough to really understand what restarting the interface does exactly.
Are there persistent logs somewhere I can check to monitor what's going with watchcat or the WAN connection?
I guess I'm having a similar issue recently. I'm using the Flint 2 as home router and I got rid of the ISP provided one. It works flawlessly until suddenly it stops having internet access, I'm using wan port, can't try to change to the wan/lan port that easily since I'll need to tell the ISP to modify the MAC ADDRESS of the port. I assume I could try setting it up and just clone the wan port MAC and maybe I'll give that a try.
Meanwhile I would like to share logs and maybe get some help or advice of what could be the issue I'm facing.
FW version is 4.7.7 release1 and kernel version is 5.4.238 logread.tar (250 KB)
Ultimately I got around my issues by automating reboots when the Internet went down for a certain period of time. On the Flint 2, I'm using watchcat to do that and then upstream of that I have a tc4400 modem that seemed to also have the issue - no way to run a script on that, so instead I'm using a local Shelley smart plug running a script to cycle power to the modem when the Internet goes down for five minutes. I have a script on a device logging whenever that happens and it seems to be working - Internet keeps going down but after automated restarts it comes back up.
Surely the fix here would be to find out why the internet keeps being dropped.
If it happened on your previous router would it not be something to do with your modem? Or your ISP?
With the ISP provided modem it never happened.
That's why I've sent logs here, I was hoping for someone to help me find out the issue.
The ISP says to me that nothing is wrong on the line. But since I've dropped their modem they can't do "full" troubleshooting since they can't reach their modem, so they stop at "nothing's wrong and no problems reported in your area".
It could even be something related to the external ONT they provided me when they set up the FTTH in my home. To check this I'll need to change ISP and so they'll provide me a new ONT.
My hope is that's nothing related to my request for changing modem