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?