1y ago

What is your contingency for when the ISP goes down?

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/

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Lots of beer and a book
- Coffee and any of my Chinese handhelds DS/PSP!

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.

Reading a book. 😊
- Most underrated solution!
  Bliss...

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.
  
  They mean using something with a cellular radio. A router, or a tethered cellphone.
- Cries in rural

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.

This probably doesn’t help you unless a competing provider is available to you, but I pay for business class internet just to avoid that issue. I pay double over residential rates, and it’s slower, but I get five static IPs and it’s rock solid uptime and latency because I get QoS’d over all my neighbors. It’s been down for more than an hour only twice in 17 years, and both times were due to cable cuts by construction work in my neighborhood. Even on those cuts my service was restored within 4-6 hours. I get better tech support, and a 4 hour response time for ANY tech issue with the service.
It’s one of the few times I’ve seen that “you get what you pay for” rang so true.
- Whos your ISP? Sounds like the Virgin package i had but i dont remember it being that much more expensive than their residential package and im sure I had fairly comparable speeds. I had 350 down 20 up for about £50 about 3 years back
  
  You probably won't believe this after all the good things I said, but it's Comcast. I usually leave that part out when I tell people my experience because they don't believe it. But I've found there's a world of difference between the residential and business experience with them. I absolutely would not use them for residential class service after things I've heard.

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.

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.
- Depends on the country / provider. Many cell companies provide battery backup & even gas generators
- Just realised the residential package came with phone and tv so that probably makes up the price difference

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]

Good bot

I’ve been considering pulling the trigger on a cellular home network as backup. At least in the US you can get cellular home internet service as an add on to your cell phone bill. It would be significantly slower than my primary service, but seems like it would be a reasonable backup to avoid completely losing internet due to maintenance or general bad stability.

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 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.
  
  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.
  
  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)
  
  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
  
  If it's self hosted, what do you need the Internet for? You host the master copy locally.
  
  Why post an open ended question and then be a dick when someone answers?
  It’s never too late to apologize.

If everything is local it doesn't matter if your ISP goes down, it'll all work fine.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 good ole reliable t mobile. Fml

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...

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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