/opnsense-wifi-watchdog

OPNSense Cron task to monitor WIFI status, fix or reboot to fix.

Primary LanguageShellDo What The F*ck You Want To Public LicenseWTFPL

This aims to monitor a specific WLAN connection and try to keep ip up at almost all costs.

The idea comes from an opnSense system I manage remotely but that is only connected to the wider world through a WIFI connection, when it fails, I feel that only little effort is beeing made by opnSense to try to bring that connection up again, so I felt the need to regularly check the connectivity and try to act as best I could.

Concept

The idea is quite simple :

  • add a custom cron task that will run our script (inspired from the official doc)
  • schedule that task to run every 5 minutes (using GUI)
  • have our script check the WIFI connection and try to fix it :
    1. check link status and IP
    2. try to reload the interface
    3. if it fails to bring it up, simply reboot the opnSense box.

Install

cd /home/<your-user>/
git clone <this repo url>
chmod +x ./install.sh
./install.sh

Then in the GUI you should be able to ad a cron task selecting "Wifi watchdog" in the command dropdown and giving it 3 parameters :

  • the interface name as it show in ifconfig, should be something like ath0_wlan1
  • the matching interface name in the opnSense sense : something like opt3
  • the number of seconds to wait for an interface reconfigure to hopefully solve the link being down, after this wait if the interface is not up and connected the script will reboot the system. Typically 60 seconds is enought for what I see.

Usage

Look at the end of the install section to use it with the GUI. Logs are not integrated in GUI as of now.

You can start the script manually like this :

configctl wifiwatchdog update ath0_wlan1 opt3 60

Looks like you don't even need to be root to do that and get the script executed by root nonetheless.

Logs

It's not realy clean as of now, but we generate 2 logfiles : /var/log/wifi_watchdog.log and /var/log/wifi_watchdog.log.uptime.csv

The path of these logfiles can be changed in the script itself in /usr/local/bin/wifiwatchdog.sh

You might want to make sure /var/log is not lost upon reboots if you want to keep your logs.

@todo: rotate the logs at some point ==> Meanwhile, you need to clear the log files manually whenever you think is right to avoid filling your filesystem. I tried to not log too much but still wanted useful info for debug.