Interface always up (ModemManager)

[Lebedev]

According to this commit, the netifd now always knows when an interface goes down. This is especially relevant for 2G/3G/4G/5G mobile connections, since mobile providers sometimes perform a provider initiated disconnect. As an example, the german mobile provider o2 (telefonica) is doing so every 24 hours. An automatic reconnect does still not happen. The connection stays disconnected until a manual reconnect is being performed.

Currently, i use watchcat along with a script to restart the interface, when pings to 8.8.8.8 fail. But i feel like this isn't really necessary anymore, because of the mentioned commit.

So, I would like to kindly ask for a little LuCI checkbox in the interface configuration which automatically restarts the interface (ifup), as soon as the underlying network connection goes down.

I hope this feature request would help to reduce the "no-connection" timegap, because pinging external targets like watchcat does, always requires you to wait some time before restarting the interface (ping timeouts can happen for other reasons too).

Thanks folks, i really appreciate your work!

[Lebedev]

I just noticed, this Feature Request already exists:

Support 4G/5G automatic reconnection using ModemManager

Right now on an ISP-triggered 4G/5G disconnection, ModemManager will not automatically reconnect. It merely reports the disconnection to netifd and that's it. Work is needed to be done to the netifd protocol to tie things up to react to the reported disconnection and reconnect. Back in November 2022, I raised this issue here: And @aleksander0m wrote: The way to solve this, after briefly talking with @jow- about this in IRC would be to have the netifd protocol handler launch a "watcher" pro…

Please close this case.

[reinerotto]

The ping method catches both the scenarios, that interface is down, or phys. wwan is up, but no traffic possible. I.e. when data volume exhausted. Or the modem 'hangs'. Thus, using ping, is the more reliable method.