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!
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.
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.
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
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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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.
I have good ole reliable t mobile. Fml
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.
If everything is local it doesn’t matter if your ISP goes down, it’ll all work fine.
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.
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.
We keep vital info cached locally to our devices, using Syncthing for credentials and files (KeePass databases, tech notes, documents, etc.), and a Radicale instance for syncing calendaring and contacts to our Android phones using Etar and DAVx⁵. So, no real need for any connectivity when away from the home.
I have starlink has backup for my DSL. Actually had a 5 day outage over eastern. Was a matter of 5 minutes to book a month of service and I was back online.
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.
