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/
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?
https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wan/multiwan/mwan3
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.
most routers have a usb port and usb lte modems are relatively cheap and widely available.
Cries in rural