Routers pinging 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 on their own?

sloperyslope · 2021-11-18T02:03:01.617Z

LONG time GL-inet router user, first time poster here!!

I’m testing out both a GL-AR300M and a GL-AR750S, both with firmware 3.203.

I see both routers regularly sending icmp (ping) traffic to both 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 (Google’s DNS servers). I’m wondering if this is some kind of keepalive or test for Internet connectivity.

It doesn’t matter if Wireguard is connected as a client or not (or even configured for that matter), it makes no difference if I use these IP’s for the DNS servers for the WAN or something else. It even pings those IP’s if the kill switch is on and wireguard isn’t connected! I’ve tried with no wifi radios on and nothing but the WAN cable connected. No clients at all connected in any way, and the box is still pinging the google dns servers (which I can see happening with the GL router’s WAN ip activity showing on my upstream router).

Is there a setting in the UI or Luci to disable this? If using the router as a Wireguard client, I want NO traffic other than that which goes over the wireguard connection to the remote server.

Thank you!

alzhao · 2021-11-18T02:29:50.049Z

The router comes with mwan3 which manages multiple wan connections. It uses ping to detect Internet status.

To stop it

/etc/init.d/mwan3 stop
/etc/init.d/mwan3 disable

David · 2021-11-18T13:45:56.672Z

sloperyslope:

Is there a setting in the UI or Luci to disable this?

Also if you want you can install luci-app-mwan3 and in luci>network>load balancing/interfaces, edit the tracking hostname or IP ping as you want.

AR750S router.

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sloperyslope · 2021-11-18T19:35:48.315Z

Outstanding David. Since I don’t need load balancing and auto-failover, I simply removed the tracking hostname from WAN, WWAN, Modem, and tether. The pings stopped!!

It appears that the ntp time setting is done outside of the wireguard connection, at least at startup. While I’ve got you, is there a way to have ntp client requests (And anything else that runs on the GLI box) go only over the VPN connection if the internet kill switch is set?

David · 2021-11-19T20:51:04.540Z

I’m not 100% sure I didn’t test it if ALL traffic is through VPN

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Use VPN for all process on the router : Generally, the traffic of all processes running on the router such as GoodCloud will be routed through VPN if there is a connected VPN client (e.g. WireGuard, OpenVPN). In this case, these processes will lose Internet if VPN is disconnected. In order to ensure a proper operation of these processes, you can disable this option. As a result, they will not use VPN.