In my ever-ongoing struggle to disentangle myself and my family from our corporate overlords I have gleefully dived into self-hosting and have a little intranet oasis available; media, passwords, backups, files, notes, contacts, calendars – basically everything I needed the Big G suite for at one point, I’m hosting locally, and loving it. But Unfortunately… my ISP can be shitty. Normally its’ fine and no complaints, but every now and then the network itself goes down for maintenance for a few hours, half a day, a day. When those outages happen even though I have a battery backup/generator, I’m basically stuck treading water, unable to even listen to podcasts. I’m wondering what the folks here’ have as a contingency plan for these kinds of outages. Part of me is considering pricing out some kind of VPS for barebone, password manager, podcast player, notes etc for outages; but I haven’t dipped my toe into that world yet. Just wondering what folks are doing/recommending/
Lots of beer and a book
Coffee and any of my Chinese handhelds DS/PSP!
If everything is local it doesn’t matter if your ISP goes down, it’ll all work fine.
My goal is to set up my services so that they can mostly live with limited connectivity. Because either my phone has no internet or my at-home ISP craps its pants, but either one will happen sometime.
So it’s more about being able to gracefully resume than “perfect access”.
In other words: if something stops syncing or I can’t access some specific service that’s mostly acceptable to me. What isn’t acceptable is if the syncing got into a state that needed intervention to fix or one of my services didn’t come back when service is restored.
So in a sense resilience is more important than 100% accessibility.
The small number of exceptions (mostly password saves and other minor bits) I make sure to actively sync to my personal devices so that if my selfhosted stuff goes away I’m not 100% stranded.
Would a sim backup not solve this? Could be in a router, could be in an old phone
Sorry could you elaborate? I feel like there’s an obvious solution staring me in the face but I don’t know enough to know what I don’t know.
Sim card. Mobile internet. Tmobile, verizon, att in US, vodafone and the like in Europe. My ISP router has a slot for it, some 3rd party ones do, too.
You could also hook a phone up to be a secondary wan in your firewall. I’m assuming you’re running something like opnsense, openwrt or the like, here.
Oh! Yeah I’ve got some openwrt setup on my router, haven’t checked my isp modem for a SIM card slot though I doing recall seeing one. Do you know if there is a way to configure it so that it only handover to the sim if the isp goes down?
Cheap and cheerful 4G plugged into my Proxmox server, mapped to a secondary WAN interface for OPNsense.
I ain’t gaming over it, but I will be connected.
Seems like the way to go
I think I pay (here in Aus) 95 bucks for 30GB of data, which has a 1 year expiry.
A month out, I turn on a specific firewall rule on OPNsense to force my Usenet traffic over it. I usually eat up the balance in a day or two, at which point I disable the rule again, and top up the data for another year.
$95 for a year of 4G backup capability ain’t bad. What I haven’t done yet is setup my OPNsense rules so that the heavy traffic doesn’t route over 4G in the event of an outage. I really only want it so I can browse the internet, access email, etc.
Wait for it to go up gain 🥲. But now I’m curious how people use 4G as second option maybe I will try juat for fun.
I have good ole reliable t mobile. Fml
I plugged a mobile stick into my FritzBox and use cellular. I only tested this, never actually needed it.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters CGNAT Carrier-Grade NAT DNS Domain Name Service/System HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol NAT Network Address Translation VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
6 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 7 acronyms.
[Thread #148 for this sub, first seen 19th Sep 2023, 08:45] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
I set up a backup cell connection to my cable internet connection. Sketchy Chinese 4G LTE modem. My router was a DIY job I set up off of Ubuntu Server. Everything ran to a Cisco switch and then was VLAN isolated. For the two WAN connections, I ran scripts from the router that periodically tried to reach out to several DNS providers and then average response rates to determine if the main connection was up. If not then it would modify default routes and push everything to the cell.
The cell connection had pretty low data cap, so it was just for backup and wasn’t a home style plan. I used the old TTL modification trick to get it to pass data like a phone. When I moved the backup to 5G, TTL modification stopped working and I had to resort to creating tunnel interfaces to an actual phone. Since that tunnel is limited in bandwidth to the lowest value, my speeds were really cut in half.
First off. If Internet goes down I have a http captive portal that do some diagnos, showing where the problem is. Link on network interface, gateway reachable, dns working and dhcp lease. Second, now when it is down, show the timestamp when it went down. Third, phone number to the ISP and city fiber network owner.
Forth. Watch my local RSS feed and email folder. Also have something to watch from Youtube or Twitch game downloaded locally.
Can I get more details on this captive portal? How does it diagnose network issues or what software are you using for the captive portal?
I use very simple software for this. My firewall can use route monitoring and failover and use policy based routing. I just send all traffic to another machine with the diagnosis part. It does ping through the firewall and fetch some info from the firewall. The page itself is not pretty but say what is wrong. Enough for parents to read what error. I also send DNS traffic to a special DNS server that responds with the same static ip address - enough for the browser to continue with a HTTP GET that the firewall will send forward to my landing page. It is sad that I don’t have any more problems since I changed ISP.
Had a scenario when the page said gateway reachable but nothing more. ISP issue. DHCP lease slowly ran out. There were a fiber cut between our town and the next. Not much I could do about it. Just configured the IP static and could reach some friends through IRC in the same city so we could talk about it.
The webpage itself was written in php that read icmp logs and showed the relevants logs of up and down. Very simple.
If you are hosting everything, why do your need your ISP? Is it for access to your home services outside your home?
Yes, several dozen services are exposed bids cloudflare tunnels. Passwords, media, podcasts, notes, calendars etc. need to bed and to access those while out and about.
I have a 5g home internet backup connection. My primary internet is fiber, so my thinking if there is a cut somewhere it could also affect cable, so I use over the air as my backup.
I’ve had an ISP outage take down the local cell towers too, so keep in mind that they are possibly relying on the same fiber network that you do at home
My local cell tower is connected to the same street cabinet that my wired internet connection is connected to, and the speed of both of them is about the same.
so most of the time if your ISP goes down power is also out so cellular service might also fail because ether the power outage or high usage by useres using it as backup maybe Starlink? as it’s not affected by your local power grid
I never had a power outage where I live, but internet fails from time to time.
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