Hey kind folks -

I’m currently riding my bicycle around the world, and have an unraid server running on a dedicated machine back home. For the last month or so, it’s been more or less unusable due to the following issue, and I do not think I know enough about networking to properly troubleshoot it, especially from a great distance like I currently am.

 

The problem:

My friend who is hosting the server, with a wired connection to his router, turns it on. It functions fine after startup, I can VPN into it and access the GUI, and all dockers start and run appropriately. The router assigns it its fixed IP appropriately and I can see it as a device in the router settings. This lasts for about 5-20 minutes, and then suddenly not only can I not access the server via OpenVPN, when I log into his router the device does not appear in the list of devices with assigned IP addresses. It disappears completely as far as I can tell.

 

This problem began after a series of other issues that related to my friend’s router. We got a new router, and have configured it the exact same way (gateway, default IP, ports, etc), and the problem persists (and frankly happens faster now).

 

The server is still powered on, but I don’t know its status because I don’t know how to access it any other way from where I am - when I VPN into his router, the local IP for the server does not return anything (which makes sense, if it’s not even assigned by the router).

 

I’m out of ideas to troubleshoot at this point - the logs look fine when I can see them, but because they’re cleared on a hard reset I don’t really have insight into what’s happening.

 

Please help!

47 minutes ago, periscopehorse said:

the logs look fine when I can see them, but because they’re cleared on a hard reset I don’t really have insight into what’s happening.

syslog server

Okay, I was able to get the log from the server. This is everything it recorded - up to and including the moment it was no longer accessible. I don’t see anything that screams out to me, but I also don’t know what I’m looking for really. If someone with more knowledge on the subject could have a look and point me in any possible troubleshooting direction I would greatly appreciate it.

 

Thank you for your help, @JonathanM

 

 

syslog.txt

Your problem sounds like an IP address conflict, two devices getting the same IP address assigned.

 

You could check your router log and see what assignments have been done.

 

Thank you for the suggestion! I had the same thought originally. Router logs don’t have any conflicts or errors, and this is the only device on the network with this IP. It’s also the only device with a fixed IP… there’s only 7-8 devices on the network at any given time, so it’s easy to troubleshoot that particular question.