Lost connection with my B3

[DanielM]

Hi.
I think I've touched something stupid and now I can't reach my dear old B3 anymore. Hoping anyone here might have any idea.

My B3 always acted both server, router and everything else in my home. Now I've bought another router (a DLink DIR868-L) which has taken care of my wifi last weeks and now I thought it could as well serve the routing also. So I unplugged everything, rigged it up again and powered it up. Everything went well except for the fact that B3 didn't reach the outside world. I thought it was because it still thought it was acting router and thus tried to route all traffic to the outside via the wan port (which is no longer plugged). So I simply went into the admin web interface and in the network settings I changed "Router + Firewall + Server" into "Server only". After that I simply can't reach it anymore, it's totally gone. It's not on the IP it's supposed to be (192.168.168.1) and my IP scanner can't find it elsewhere either. Tried turning it off (using the hardware button) and on again and it boots fine and sits there with the blue light on.

Anyone knows what could have happen? What does that setting really do? How do I reach it again?

/Daniel

[johannes]

The default setting for "server only" is for it to act as a DHCP _client_ meaning it should take an IP on LAN from your other router. So check the IP lease list on your router, hopefully you'll find it there. You can of course force it to use a fixed IP on LAN (did you do this?) but it's possible that this is re-set when changing from "router" to "server" mode.

[DanielM]

The default setting for "server only" is for it to act as a DHCP _client_ meaning it should take an IP on LAN from your other router. So check the IP lease list on your router, hopefully you'll find it there. You can of course force it to use a fixed IP on LAN (did you do this?) but it's possible that this is re-set when changing from "router" to "server" mode.

Yep, I've always used fixed IP for it.

Now I have found it though. Seems it tried to act dhcp client and for some reason failed and failed back to 192.168.10.1. I put my computer directly on the lan port and gave it another 192.168.10.x-adress and then I could reach it. So now it's back to the old address.

I'm not happy yet though. This time I don't think it's a problem with my B3 but with my dlink router. Now I can reach my server using the internal name (b3) but when I try to reach it using my domain name (which resolvs to my external ip) I can't reach it. Guess that's because the router routes that traffic to wan. Guess I have to deal with that in some good way...

/Daniel

edit: Darn. I just realized that the B3 doesn't reach it's gateway (the dlink). Can't for my world understand why. From my laptop I can reach both B3 and dlink just fine. From B3 I can reach my laptop. But B3 doesn't reach dlink and also nothing that is routed through it (which is everything outside my house). Getting tired now...

edit2: Sigh. And also I only reach the B3 on ports that have exceptions in the firewall, such as the port I use for SSH. So for example nfs, which I only use inhouse and thus has no exception in the firewall doesn't work. Like the B3 now thinks that LAN is WAN. Since the firewall settings is greyed out in the admin interface now that WAN isn't connected I guess it really ought to be all open, right?

[johannes]

Yep, the B3 firewall is not involved at all if using the LAN port, if you didn't mess with the network or firewall config manually, so this has to be something else. You are sure you didn't connect it using the WAN port?

[DanielM]

Turned out it was just the daemon that had died for some reason.

Now I'm struggling with the fact that none of the devices that is connected to the dlink using wire seems to be able to communicate with each other or with the dlink. Wireless devices works fine and from my laptop I can reach stuff that is connected by wire. Just the wired devices are isolated. I'm starting to hate dlink.

And now I thought I'd try to put B3 on dhcp again with a dhcp reservation in the router giving it the same ip, seems that made me loose contact with it again. Like it simply refuses to talk to the router (not even talking dhcp) so I guess now it's fallen back to default ip.

Currently everyone in my family hates me. Nothing works here.

/Daniel

edit: Ok, pieces are starting to fall into places now. Found out that the MAC filtering rules in this router not only are valid for wireless, but also wired devices. So in order to use wireless MAC filtering I have to add the addresses of all wired devices as well.

Only problem left now is that the router doesn't seem to loop back the way I want. When I access the routers external ip from inside I want to end up in my B3 (since that is what happens when I do the exact same thing from the outside). Guess I'm moving more and more off topic here now though...

[DanielM]

Got almost everything working now. A few small quirks left if anyone's interested in looking:

1. First I noticed no mail coming in and fixed this by removing reject_unknown_sender_domain from my config. Then I noticed no mail going out and fixed this by changing my relayhost to using ip instead of name. Now mail flows in and out but I get loads of "RBL lookup error: Host or domain name not found." in my mail.warn. All those problems seems to be symptoms of name resolving not working in postfix. /etc/resolv.conf is correct and also /var/spool/postfix/etc/resolv.conf is correct. And resolving works in rest of the system, just not in postfix. Anyone knows what to do next?

2. Since now all connections to B3 comes from the same place (my router) I got problems with "Maximum number of connections from user+IP exceeded". Got around it now by setting mail_max_userip_connections to 100 in dovecot config, which seems like a not very elegant solution. Are there better ways to solve this?

/Daniel

[RandomUsername]

Regarding point 1: one of the RBLs in the default postfix config for the B3 has, I believe, since shut up shop. I can't remember which one, but I think it had a .nl domain so shouldn't be hard to work out which one. Just look at the list in /etc/postfix/main.cf.

[DanielM]

Regarding point 1: one of the RBLs in the default postfix config for the B3 has, I believe, since shut up shop. I can't remember which one, but I think it had a .nl domain so shouldn't be hard to work out which one. Just look at the list in /etc/postfix/main.cf.

Yep, I've already commented out dnsbl.sorbs.net a long time ago. Now suddenly none of them works though (and they did yesterday), and in combination with my other problems I'm quite sure it's a matter of name resolution not working.

/Daniel

[RandomUsername]

Sorbs would have been commented out because of the number of false positives they produce (I remember a discussion on here about it). And AFAIK they are still running. I do specifically remember another one shutting down in the last year or two. What lists do you have enabled in main.cf?

Not saying you don't have other problems though.

[DanielM]

What lists do you have enabled in main.cf?

Code: Select all

 reject_rbl_client dnsbl.njabl.org
# reject_rbl_client dnsbl.sorbs.net
 reject_rbl_client bl.spamcop.net
 reject_rbl_client dul.dnsbl.sorbs.net
 reject_rbl_client zen.spamhaus.org

/Daniel

[RandomUsername]

Top line is a winner. From their website:

March 1, 2013: NJABL is in the process of being shut down. The DNSBL zones have been emptied. After "the Internet" has had some time to remove NJABL from server configs, the NS's will be pointed off into unallocated space (192.0.2.0/24 TEST-NET-1) to hopefully make the shutdown obvious to those who were slower to notice.

[DanielM]

Top line is a winner. From their website:

March 1, 2013: NJABL is in the process of being shut down. The DNSBL zones have been emptied. After "the Internet" has had some time to remove NJABL from server configs, the NS's will be pointed off into unallocated space (192.0.2.0/24 TEST-NET-1) to hopefully make the shutdown obvious to those who were slower to notice.

Ah, that explains. Removed it now. Also it actually seems that name resolving is now working, it was just me thinking it still didn't work because of the .dnsbl.njabl.org errors.

Seems like my system is all up and running again now. After only like two days of job

/Daniel