dhcpcd crashes router periodically [SOLVED]

alootiki · n00b Joined: 21 Jun 2014 Posts: 6

I use wpa_supplicant with dhcpcd to connect to my home router, which uses WPA2. (I actually started with Wicd, which was way too buggy, then switched to NetworkManager, which was excellent but rather slow to start and pulled a bit too much Gnome for my taste, and ended up on wpa_supplicant)
It connects fine, but I encountered a strange issue: the router drops all connections every few minutes or so, after which it takes about a minute to get back on the network. It appears the router was flooded with dhcp requests. My computer's systemd journal is also spammed with notifications from dhcpcd.
It looks like this:

Hu · Administrator Joined: 06 Mar 2007 Posts: 23064

If your router is crashing, that is a router bug. Nothing that dhcpcd puts on the network, no matter how ill-formed, can crash a non-buggy peer. All the quoted log messages are related to IPv6. Does it help if you configure the router to use IPv4 only?

UberLord · Posted: Fri Sep 05, 2014 12:54 pm Post subject:

Fix your router so that the RA option expiry (looks like 3 seconds) is greater than the RA refresh time.
Also try upgrading your dhcpcd, never versions from around 6.3 reduced needless log spam.
_________________
Use dhcpcd for all your automated network configuration needs
Use dhcpcd-ui (GTK+/Qt) as your System Tray Network tool

alootiki · n00b Joined: 21 Jun 2014 Posts: 6

Thanks for the advice. It's probably worth mentioning that I set global ~amd64 in portage.

I certainly can't rule out the possibility of a router bug, but it is strange that only my laptop seems to break things while connecting. The rest of the family (on Windows 7/8 or iSomething) seems to have no problem. I haven't gotten the hang of configuring the router, but I will try that.

Apparently there have been reports of problems with IPv6 in dhcpcd >= 6.4.2 according to portage news (that's what I get for ignoring portage's news notifications). I am trying the fix suggested in the message, and will report back with results. If that doesn't work and I can't find anything else odd on my laptop in the next few days, I'll chalk it up to a router bug and mark this solved.

UberLord · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2014 12:51 pm Post subject:

alootiki · n00b Joined: 21 Jun 2014 Posts: 6

Whatever the problem was, it seems to be resolved. It may actually have been a router problem, since I think my dad changed some settings while I was fiddling with my laptop. FWIW, ping no longer works for external sites (e.g. google.com), only ping6, but that doesn't really matter to me.

Thank you all for your help.

UberLord · Posted: Sun Sep 07, 2014 7:11 pm Post subject: