Port forwarding being lost?

[Lucky75]

Damn...same error again today. I'm going to have to try going a day without logging into the router gui and see what happens.

[Lucky75]

I'm pretty sure that it's something on the quotas page. Every time my forwarding goes down, the quotas page doesn't load.

http://img26.imageshack.us/img26/5477/screenshotlzx.png

[Eric]

Ah, so do you have quotas active? That may be a clue.

One thing that would be really helpful: Can you ssh into the router and run the following two commands (while you're experiencing the problem), and post the output of those commands here? It may help me understand if there's anything obvious going wrong.

Run these two commands while logged into the router:

Code: Select all

iptables -t nat -L -v
iptables -t filter -L -v

Thanks!

[Eric]

Ok, I've uploaded new bleeding-edge firmware that may solve this problem.

There's a very long discussion on this issue in the openwrt forums, which can be found here. Because of the intermittent nature of the problem it's very difficult to debug, but one user, netprince, deleted a bunch of rarely-used iptables modules and claims that this solved the problem. Only one of those modules is used by Gargoyle, so I've created a patch that eliminates all but the one being used.

I've personally been unable to replicate the problem at all (with or without removing the suggested modules), but that's the nature of this insidious thing -- it's really intermittent. So, I can't be sure this will solve the problem, but it's the best I can do. I'm shooting in the dark here, with one hand tied behind my back.

Incidentally, I think the reason the quotas page was not loading properly when this bug is triggered, is because when the bug is triggered there's some huge problem with iptables as a whole. The quotas depend on iptables, so this is a symptom not the cause.

If you're experiencing this bug, please try the latest bleeding-edge firmware, and if you still have a problem, report back in this thread. Thanks!

[Lucky75]

Wicked! Thanks. I'll probably give the new firmware a try as soon as I manage to reproduce the current problem for you so that I can get that output.

Just for my information, but how would one go about updating to the latest firmware? Would it wipe current settings and act just as a new flashed device? Or can I just manually scp files over or something? Is there an "Update" feature for the firmware?

[Eric]

Updating firmware does wipe the current settings. However, if you're currently running one of the recent (within the last month) bleeding edge releases you should be able to backup your settings (and have them restored properly ) in in the System/Backup & Restore section of the interface. You can upgrade firmware in the System/Update Firmware section of the interface. Afterwards you can go back to the Backup/Restore section to restore the settings you saved before the firmware was reinstalled.

[Lucky75]

I sent you a PM with the output

[Eric]

Thanks, though I only see the output from the first command here. Looking over what you sent me I don't see any obvious cause of the problem, though that's consistent with what was reported in the OpenWrt forum. One question: since you have a bunch of port forwards set up, do all of them die or is it just one or two that stop working?

[Lucky75]

It seems that all of them die. I have two ports open for ssh (one forwards to the other), and I can't get in on either of them. I also noticed that my bittorrent was stalled while I had the issue, so I would assume that those ports weren't being forwarded either.

So you're saying that the upgrade to the latest firmware should fix the issue? Also, you mentioned fixing the DHCP loop? Is that in the latest release too?

Crap. It seems that I forgot to save after pasting the second part I'll pm you.

[Eric]

The DHCP loop is fixed, and a potential solution to the port forwarding problem is included in the latest release (currently uploaded). As I said earlier, I can't replicate the issue. I am merely applying a patch that another OpenWrt user claims solves the problem.