Topic: Network service restart

[dave]

Hello All,

Sorry folks, when I have problems, I always seem to write books.  

I have an issue with my ISP, they're not the most reliable.  Normally, when there's a service interruption SME can reconnect without incident (wonderful product!).  When the service drops and they (they being the ISP) change some configuration, like the authentication server/auth server name etc or the DHCP host, when the service is restored, SME can't reconnect unless I reboot.

I've looked around here and have found things like:
'service network restart' and 'service eth0 (or eth1 or pppoe) restart' and 'pppoed restart' etc but they won't force the system to re-read the ISP's new parameters.

A few details:
I'm using SBC Ameritech ADSL PPPoE service, I have a static IP that's assigned via DHCP.  I was supplied with a DSL modem by the ISP when I signed up for the service.  When service drops (it used to be daily - they've improved a bit) and I'd call them, their standard response was always: 'turn off the DSL modem for 2 minutes, power down the computer, power the DSL up and when the lights stop flashing then turn the computer back on'.  I think what is going on is the modem has to be powered down to clear it's NV RAM and force it to request new params from the ISP.  Then booting the PC afterwards also does some kind of auto-discovery process when the WAN NIC in the server comes up so the cable modem can communicate properly with the server.

As I noted earlier, I can restart the network service, which only seems to restart the internal network service.  I can restart the individual daemons for the NIC and PPPoE but again, it doesn't produce the desired effect.  The big indicator that I'm doing something wrong this, when I do reboot the server, the NIC light doesn't come on until some time into the boot process but when I cycle services, the NIC light stays on all the time.  This makes me think I'm not restarting the appropriate service.  BTW: I do still power cycle the DSL modem as I try restarting the individual services.

The ideal here would be that I could show my wife how to recycle the appropriate service (with some kind of script) rather than have her reboot the server when internet params change.

So, now that I've provided lots of useless info, what do you need to know that'll help solve the problem?

Thanks,
Dave

[Bill Talcott]

It probably doesn't help much, but here's a script I use. For a while, the LAN NIC would randomly stop working until it was restarted.

#!/bin/bash
# netfix.sh
#
# Script to restart network.
# Used when cable modem goes down
# or when LAN NIC stops working.
#
echo ""
echo ""
echo ""
echo "Restarting networks..."
echo ""
/etc/rc.d/init.d/network restart

You may need to add a command to release/renew the DHCP lease, but we have static IPs so I can't help much with that.