u/Chill_Squirrel

ARP changes on WAN killing connection, no auto-recovery

Hey everyone. I'm with a fiber ISP for a few months now which worked very stable as long as I had their modem as gateway on the WAN port. A week ago they finally set up the bridge mode I asked for, I now still have the modem inbetween but with a bridged connection directly to the external gateway.

Since then, I experience daily dropouts of my WAN connection that immediately fix themselves when I reload the WAN interface. One evening last week it got so bad that it happened like every 3 minutes. This is when I figured out that it has to do with the MAC of the gateway changing (I assume due to loadbalancing or smth). Whenever this happens, DHCP breaks and I need to reload the interface.

The logs always look like this. 09:49:59 is when I triggered the interface reload.

2026-05-13T09:47:00 Notice dhclient dhclient-script: New IP Address (ix1): 195......
 2026-05-13T09:47:00 Notice dhclient dhclient-script: New Hostname (ix1): 7c5a1c846db5 
 2026-05-13T09:47:00 Notice dhclient dhclient-script: Reason REBOOT on ix1 executing 
 2026-05-13T09:46:59 Notice opnsense /usr/local/etc/rc.configure_interface: ROUTING: entering configure using wan 
 2026-05-13T09:46:59 Notice dhclient dhclient-script: Reason PREINIT on ix1 executing 
 2026-05-13T09:46:59 Critical dhclient exiting. 
 2026-05-13T09:46:59 Error dhclient short write: wanted 20 got 0 bytes 
 2026-05-13T09:46:59 Notice dhclient dhclient-script: Reason FAIL on ix1 executing 
 2026-05-13T09:46:59 Error dhclient My address (195.69.173.56) was deleted, dhclient exiting 
 2026-05-13T09:44:01 Notice kernel <6>[471538] arp: 195.69.173.1 moved from 00:0e:00:00:01:01 to 00:0e:00:00:01:03 on ix1 
 2026-05-13T09:42:50 Notice dhclient dhclient-script: Creating resolv.conf 
 2026-05-13T09:42:50 Notice dhclient dhclient-script: New Hostname (ix1): 7c5a1c846db5

I already tried the following settings that solved similar issues for others, which did unfortunately not help:

* Enable "Skip rules when gateway is down"

* Disable reply-to on WAN rules

* Enable "Dynamic gateway policy" on the interface

Any ideas?

reddit.com
u/Chill_Squirrel — 16 hours ago