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/
All services which I need access to when I’m not home I host on a vps. All services which need lots of storage, I host at home.
Yes seems very reasonable. I like keeping things in silicon I can touch… but I may need to look into a remote solution for some essential services
I plugged a mobile stick into my FritzBox and use cellular. I only tested this, never actually needed it.
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?
Amazing. Thanks
They mean using something with a cellular radio. A router, or a tethered cellphone.
🤦♂️ That could work! Data sims are cheap in my country, and yeah I might have an old phone I could use as a hotspot. I wonder if I could configure it so that it comes in only if the isp network drops. I’d also want some roles in place so that the data isn’t accidentally scarfed down by a hunger download…
Perhaps there’s a way to do this via hotspot, but I meant tether via physical connection to the router. Some routers do offer failover to secondary networks. Possibly with qos to prevent scarfing, as you put it ;)
Thanks I’ll take a look at the back of the router to see what I/O im working with.
On most consumer level routers the hardware is unlikely to be the restricting factor, but the software could quite possibly not allow that option.
If you could (and are willing to!) flash something like OpenWRT (or DD-WRT, I haven’t used either one in a long time) onto it, then you could potentially unlock the full potential of the router.
Yep long ago flashes OpenWRT Merlin on my router. I’m not sure if there’s a slot for SIM cards though is the problem.
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.
Is it something you can address with your ISP?
Changing ISP is just not an option for most people. Sometimes a different class of service will Improve link reliability.
The other thing you could consider is some kind of mobile hotspot.
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.
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Good bot
Lots of beer and a book
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.
In some places you can get a home internet line that runs through the mobile phone data network, and they tend to be more reliable than cabled connections, they can get even better if they use a modem data plan and not explicitly a home bulk plan. It really hinges on how much data you use and what plans are available where you are. Of course if you do it this way you won’t have a private IPV4, but if your ISP allows IPV6, that should be unique and directly accessible no matter what.
As the other poster mentioned there are routers that have a SIM connection as backup, and now they’re being offered with a SIM and automatic fail-over as part of some fiber to the home plans.
i have cable, in the us, it goes out for awhile probably on a weekly basis. calling them is pointless.
if i really need internet–and i did a couple weeks ago when it happened (i don’t carry an internet-capable phone), my office is less than five minutes away and has dsl. the phone company has proven itself to be far more reliable than cable, even if they are scummy, greedy bastards just like cable and wireless companies.
I have a multi-WAN configuration on my router, with ipv6 VDSL then ipv4 VDSL then a prepaid 4G modem as the backup link. I rarely fail over but it’s been fantastic watching traffic stats when it does.
My only downside is the CGNAT on that connection that prevents things like a backup VPN gateway…
I have two internet connections - one is fiber and the other is cable. My cable is the backup connection and is a lower tier offering with a 1.2 TB/month cap while my primary fiber is 1gig symmetrical with no data cap. I use pfsense to handle failover in case of an outage.
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.
USB tethering between home server and cellphone with cheap data plan. Setup iptables rules/default routes on the server and other devices on my LAN, to route traffic to the Internet through the server and the USB modem/phone. Call ISP and wait 3 months for them to unfuck phone/fiber pole trashed by tractor. Keep paying for service while it is down. Keep calm and carry on, at least I got a backup Internet access.
I don’t need to access this server from outside (and it wouldn’t work as the mobile Internet plan uses CGNAT), just to have the laptop or phone on the same LAN once in a while to let Nextcloud sync do its thing (essential files, Keepass database…). I suppose I could set up a wireguard tunnel between the home server and my cheap VPS, and access it from there, I just don’t have the need for it.
If the internet or power goes out I read a book.
I’ll make sure to dot hat when I need access to my essential passwords during an internet outage. Thanks. Truly helpful beyond words.
He has actually a point. You need access to your services for which purposes? As long as you are @home, you have access to your services (but those cannot reach outside). You can still browse your photos and likes.
If you are out, it’s easier to get a copy of what you need on your device (e.g. passwords) than set up a backup internet connection. (IMO, at least)
That’s one of the reasons why my essential passwords are in a KeePass file that gets synced to my primary devices. Even if I completely loose access to my servers/accounts/… I will still be able to access them.
Tbh I use Vaultwarden which does something similar. I technically have access to my passwords even if the service is down because I have an encrypted copy on the device. I can’t add to the database though, but it’s not just passwords that are baked into my daily life though. Having my podcasts and audiobooks self hosted is great - but let me totally out of sorts when inaccessible because the network goes down. Calendar, contacts, photos and notes are knocked out by an outage as well.
If it’s self hosted, what do you need the Internet for? You host the master copy locally.
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The guy gave you a very valid answer. You asked what people do when the Internet goes out, not how they access passwords. No need to be rude
I’ve been in IT all my life, starting in the mid 80’s. Got an extensive home lab and host pretty much everything you tend to use as SAAS these days at home too. Home mail, cloud, web based office suite, etc.
But for the “what if your ISP goes down”, well, then I switch to my neighbors ISP XD.
There’s dozens of ISPs of various sizes where I live and there’s neighbors representing 8 of these ISPs. I have access to all their networks (most of them gave access).
So if my ISP goes down, I switch to another one.
That said, I haven’t had an outage longer than 30 minutes in 5 years and the average time between shorter outages (quick resets to minutes long) happen 1ce a year or so.
There are some announced outages, usually once per quarter, for network upgrades and system maintenance. But generally, my ISP has a 99,99% uptime.
