Recently, Comcast did some “upgrades” which caused Pfsense to be unable to ping their gateway. Because of this, my gateway is showing that it is down all the time now, as it is not replying to ICMP requests.
I saw that as a work around to this, you can add a different IP address as the “Monitor IP” which will be pinged and give you an idea of whether or not your interface has a good connection. I chose to use Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and my interface is showing available again as expected.
My question is regarding this bit of language in the documentation. I know this probably isn’t the case, but I just want to be sure that all of my network traffic is not going through this new IP (I don’t think that would be possible as this IP likely only listens to port 53 anyways).
My goal is just to use this IP as a canary of sorts to tell me if I have WAN access, I do not want any traffic actually going through it other than ICMP requests bouncing off of it.
Sorry for the noob question.
It just adds a static route so that if dynamic route tables change it doesn’t have to wait to re-learn the new routes to start pinging that IP again.
It won’t change your gateway routing for normal traffic.
Got it, thanks very much for the explanation.
You might be able to do a traceroute and find the new IP address that your ISP is using now… of course, if it keeps changing you’re still better with 1.1.1.1
