Networking

Intermittent Connectivity

A common cause of intermittent connectivity, especially when multiple interfaces are on the same L2 segment, is the default behavior of ARP on linux.

Reproduce the issue

First, identify your gateway IP address, referred to hereafter as gateway_ip

[root@chi-edge etc]# ip route show default
default via 129.114.34.254 dev brpublic proto static metric 427

Attempt to ping this address, both from the host, and from inside the neutron router namespace.

-D Print timestamp (unix time + microseconds as in gettimeofday) before each line.

-O Report outstanding ICMP ECHO reply before sending next packet. This is useful together with the timestamp -D to log output to a diagnostic file and search for missing answers.

-n Numeric output only. No attempt will be made to lookup symbolic names for host addresses.

[shermanm@chi-edge ~]$ ping -D -O -n 129.114.34.254
PING 129.114.34.254 (129.114.34.254) 56(84) bytes of data.
[1642959883.911513] 64 bytes from 129.114.34.254: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=2.21 ms
[1642959884.910674] 64 bytes from 129.114.34.254: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=1.83 ms

[shermanm@chi-edge ~]$ sudo ip netns exec qrouter-33cbf0c8-ff4e-40f3-b704-55bc9cbb5dcf bash
[root@chi-edge shermanm]# ping -D -O -n 129.114.34.254
PING 129.114.34.254 (129.114.34.254) 56(84) bytes of data.
[1642959964.131076] 64 bytes from 129.114.34.254: icmp_seq=1 ttl=64 time=1.29 ms
[1642959965.137204] 64 bytes from 129.114.34.254: icmp_seq=2 ttl=64 time=6.02 ms

If you observe this failing from one or the other namespace, check the system arp table.

[root@chi-edge etc]# ip -s  neighbor show 129.114.34.254
129.114.34.254 dev br-ex lladdr 50:c7:09:09:e9:60 used 153459/153519/153459 probes 0 STALE
129.114.34.254 dev brpublic lladdr 50:c7:09:09:e9:60 ref 1 used 661/1/661 probes 4 REACHABLE