Good day Team & Community
I have a strange fault with our WAN 1 connection on our Peplink MAX BR2. We have a Starlink Maritime setup with two antennas connected via passthough on the Starlink router and one each connected to WAN 1 - STBD Antenna and WAN 2 - Port Antenna. Over the past week (since I have been onboard the vessel) the WAN 1 connection keeps failing its healthcheck via DNS Lookup whereas the WAN 2 connection never fails. The settings are exactly the same for both ports and yet only the WAN 1 port is failing. We have also swopped the antennas across the ports and yet still WAN 1 fails the health check.
I am unsure where to turn next. Any support wll be greatly appreciated.
Yeah weird.
First check the support.cgi page on the BR2 and look at the port stats - any errors there?
When you swapped the port / starboard dishes was if literal unplug both and swap?
are they both using dns lookup for health check? same dns servers? what happens if you try a different health check option such as ping?
I tracked an extremely subtle bug in the http:// health checks that was due to starlink dropping some DNS queries… Every now and then from XX:00 to xx:02 on random hours. So an exactly two minute outage at the top of the hour every now and then. (one to two times a day) Only on the starlinkl wan, my AT&T 5G connection never gave an error with the exact same health checks, so it wasn’t the DNS server or the HTTP server. Starlink’s CG NAT network was having an occasional problem, and they won’t debug anything so subtle.
This was in 8.2.1, and the fix was included in the general 8.3.0. Now I don’t think you are seeing this bug, but what triggered the issue was Starlink dropping DNS packets.
To debug this I had to sniff the traffic on a switch between the Peplink and Starlink, capture every single health check packet for hours and then analyze who was not responding.
I would give a different type of health check a try, http, ping etc…
Hi Martin, Paul and mystery
I sincerely appreciate the responses. I decided to try the PING Healthcheck this morning with a PING to 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 and bingo the connection came back straight away and I didn’t have to do anything on the Starlink. That to me says that there was a recurring issue in the Healthcheck on WAN 1. That or if the healthcheck fails just once the connection disconnects permanently. I will continue to monitor now over the next week and report back on the findings. Just so you know, I have left the WAN 2 antenna on DNS Lookup to see if there is any difference in connection performance over the next week.
Martin - Yes it was a physical swop.
mystery - Yes they were both using DNS Lookup for healthchecks. The DNS was not specfied just ticked the button “Use first two DNS servers as Health Check DNS Servers”
Thanks again
