Normally my Internet connection is pretty good; but, once every couple of months, the provider changes something and my current IP address no longer works. The lease doesn’t actually expire, which is set to last 48 hours. So, I lose internet connectivity until a new renewal. It’s easy to do this by hand, but that doesn’t work when I’m not at home.

This is a script that checks to see if I’m connected to the Internet, and if it fails three times in a row, it connects to the router (pfSense in this case) and performs a DHCP release and renew.

#!/bin/bash
#change to some writeable directory
cd /home/user

#check various sites
curl http://www.msn.com > internetchecksites
curl http://www.yahoo.com >> internetchecksites
curl http://www.google.com >> internetchecksites
curl http://www.cnn.com >> internetchecksites
curl http://www.cisco.com >> internetchecksites
curl http://www.hp.com >> internetchecksites

#count the number of lines received over http
#should be tons of crap from one of these alone
sizeofsites=`cat internetchecksites | wc -l`

#check to see if there are less than ten lines of HTML
if [ $sizeofsites -lt 10 ]; then
#mark a failure to the failure file
echo “strike” >> failedchecks
else
#reset the failure count
rm failedchecks
touch failedchecks
fi

#if check has failed 3 times run the dhcp renewal process
if [ `cat failedchecks | wc -l` -ge 3 ]; then
curl -su admin:somepassword http://192.168.x.x/status_interfaces.php -d interface=”wan” -d submit=”Release” >> pf
curl -su admin:somepassword http://192.168.x.x/status_interfaces.php -d interface=”wan” -d submit=”Renew” >> pf
rm pf
fi

exit

Now just stick this script in your crontab for every 5 minutes or so.

~$ crontab -e

Add this line

*/5 * * * * /home/user/checkinternetscript.sh

The */5 is for every five minutes.

Make sure the script is executable with a nice chmod +x

The hardest part is determining what commands need to be sent to the HTTP interface on your router for a renewal.

This can be done by viewing the source code on the web page. It can also be done using a packet capture as well.

Make sure other users aren’t adding to your failedchecks file or they can cause a DHCP release/renew.