These days I’ve been experiencing problems with my home network. Normally problems like this should not be too difficult to troubleshoot. Yet as more than one thing has been changed in the past few weeks, it no longer is the case. What I have changed recently includes upgrading several systems to Fedora 40 and a new ISP-provided GPON modem. I also started radvd to provide SLAAC to make my internal environment fully IPv6. As Fedora 40 is still the latest stable Fedora release, you cannot expect all of its functions run without glitches. What is more is that I mostly use VMware Workstation Pro to run my virtual machines.
The latest VMware Workstation Pro is 17.5.2. But this version has problems compiling related modules with newer kernel versions, so I have to use something called VMware host modules (https://github.com/mkubecek/vmware-host-modules and https://github.com/nan0desu/vmware-host-modules). Nevertheless the two Github repos do not really solve all the problems with kernel versions later than 6.9.5 and I still encounter instability issues. I finally just use VMware Workstation Pro 17.5.2 and set the Fedora kernel version to 6.8.5 and this change works great so far on several host machines.
The above sounds OK and then what the heck is the network problem? The thing is that some of my machines started to have problems connecting to the Internet through IPV6 addresses and the problems did not persist or remain consistent. Sometimes both IPv4 and IPv6 were problematic. I even suspected it might be poor cabling and then removed all of the connected flat cables and replaced them with round cables to minimize EMI problems. Packet capturing and analysis did not help much either. After ruling out many possible sources I just restarted that GPON modem and then those problems just went away.
That GPON modem started to cause problems on Aug. 3, 2024 (refer to https://www.timluo.net/networking-problem/) and then the problem just stated above. I might call the ISP again to see what they could deal with it or consider replacing the GPON modem with something else. Something like a MikroTik router.
