MareLuce

Before my next international trip, I’ll have work done in my attics (2 water heaters to be replaced by the tankless kind…). It’s possible that the plumbers could do something to inadvertently mess up the original house builders’ network cabling. The cables are not all in protected conduits like you’d think.

Problem:

I need to know immediately if something takes down my home's internet access. I need a convenient *instant* internet connectivity (WAN) down status alert. Convenient simply means I don’t need to be in the electronics closet looking at the LED on my router to see if it flips from green to red.


Indicators that you might think would be an immediate internet status indicator were *not* at all immediate or valid. Examples:

- Not Pandora
I started playing Pandora off one of the TVs thinking that when internet went down, the music would stop.
No. It kept going for a while. It must buffer or something. Then it stopped.


- Not the iPhone’s WiFi connected symbol, upper left on the screen
No. That symbol just means I can connect to my wireless router inside the house. It does not mean my wireless router can also get to the world.


- Not Alexa
No. I thought Alexa would announce there’s a problem. I know I’ve heard that before. But she didn’t. So I’d need to keep asking for the weather to know if she can’t get to the internet.

So I google'd for a WiFi connected clock that gets its time off a SNTP server, thinking that it would show an indicator of some kind as soon as the WiFi signal was lost.
Wow, those are expensive for what they do! $200 and above for the 2-3 models on Amazon.

I guess the ideal solution would be:

I receive a text message whenever when my home internet connectivity goes down.

Am I missing anything obvious? What would you use?

This would also be wonderful for critical work scenarios. Like when I'm leading a morning e-meeting with 200 people. If I see a text message that my internet access is down when I wake up, I might still have time to drive to somewhere with WiFi to deliver the call and share off my laptop screen.

PS:

I learned the above yesterday because a Spectrum (former Time Warner) technician was at my house for 2 hours. I’m paying $74/month in Austin, Texas, for 100Mbps down, 10 up. But I was only getting 20 down, 10 up.

Fixed! Now I’m seeing > 118Mbps down. 10up.

I followed the tech everywhere to understand what he did. I also learned the value in insisting on
1) a Spectrum employee, not a contractor
2) a “signature service technician”,
when I made the appt.

Both good pieces of advice from the last tech who came out several years back.

el aye

You are asking for something that will alert you when you are gone, yes?

The issue here is that you will need whatever it is to alert you to be based outside of the network, ie it will be pinging your network to make sure it is still active... because once your network goes down anything setup within the LAN won't be able to send a signal outside of that :P

I'll think about this for a bit, off the top of my head I can't think of anything that would immediately alert you. There's certainly a lot of easy ways to do the check manually. Why can't you just check once a day? Ie if your goal is to let you know if the plumbers messed up why can't you just call them in the evening and ask them if they got into any wires?

Qwkynuf

I run a couple of servers on my home network, so I have my DSL router set up to forward several ports - port 80 for example, for my www server.
I use a free service called Uptime Robot (uptimerobot.com) to monitor each of these ports. It tries to contact each of my servers every 5 minutes, and notifies me via email, text message, app pop-up on my iPad and Android phone if one (or more) goes down.

I imagine that it could be configured to work with a dynamic ip system without too much work

MareLuce

Ideally when I am home or gone. I’ll be at home for the most urgent, upcoming situation (plumbers replacing my water heaters).

If the sensor were inside my house, and it can’t ping an internet location, then something needs to immediately happen. Like a siren goes off :-)? Then I could race upstairs to the attic and say, “OK what did you just do 5 seconds ago”


Agreed. That’s what I ended out doing yesterday. I repeatedly had to run SpeedTest on my iPhone when the net was supposed to be working but wasn’t. That was just for 2 hours. Plumbers will be here for 8 hours to do the 2 tank standard water heater --> 1 tankless water heater retrofit. Running SpeedTest on my iPhone for 8 hours... ick.

At this point, I’d be thrilled with a BTN (Better Than Nothing) solution for the I'm-at-Home scenario. Any kind of alert where I don’t have to be constantly clicking on an app or in the electronics room staring at my router LED.


What are the odds someone will remember, 5 hours later, or even 15 minutes later, what they did that could have caused a problem? Vs if I can ask them within a minute and also personally look around with them for a pulled wire. (Assuming I overcome my fear of going into the upper attic.)

The after hours plumbing company person will say, “You need to call your internet service provider. They can fix the problem. You have hot water still, right?”

MareLuce

Interesting!

i wonder if Uptime Robot checking my Asus RT-AC87 router could perform this function for me somehow.

Qwkynuf

To be really useful, it would need to be able to communicate with something that is *inside* your network. If your router is capable of (and configured to) respond to a ping request, it would at least be able to tell you if either the router itself is down, or there is something wrong with the wiring between the router and the Internet.

If it were able to connect to a service on a computer inside your network, then it would be able to verify that the network upstream of the router is working as well.

LAXlocal

if you are at home can you have a WiFi iPad or a phone stream music off YouTube etc


if the internet goes down then the music stops.......simple ?

MareLuce

I described that above. I just added bolding and "Not" in front of Pandora" to make that clearer :-).

I learned this yesterday because a Spectrum (former Time Warner) technician was at my house for 2 hours. He disconnected the internet coax. Pandora played on for a while.



I agree with you there should be a simple answer though. But I haven't thought of one yet!

MareLuce

@ Qwkynuf, I sent UPtime Robot a question about it. Thanks!

el aye

Yep, looked at the website and it looks like that would fit the bill for you as long as you can setup a suitable method (pinging the router may work, you'd have to make sure your router doesn't have any settings telling it to ignore pings). The only unfortunate thing about this is unless you are using something that can change with your IP address (like using noip, dynip or similar dynamic DNS servers) you will break the service every time your modem goes down/reboots and pulls a new IP address from Spectrum. The 2 dynamic DNS options there I think would require you to be running a PC.

Dodge DeBoulet

A number of modern routers directly support DDNS. My Netgear R9000 does (as long as you're not using Netgear's free service, which, although using No-IP at the back end, has some unfortunate bugs). I have an acccount with No-IP and a couple of hosts set up at different locations and it works well for my security cameras.

And if you've replaced your router's firmware with DD-WRT, OpenWRT or a few other alternatives, DDNS is very likely supported and works quite well.

FastTrak2Elite

Check out Pingdom.com

javabytes

Seems like there are two ways to solve this problem.

1. Have something outside your network try to contact something within your network. This means you need to expose some device so it can be contacted from the outside. First step is to enable Dynamic DNS, so that whatever solution you go with can keep up when your IP address changes. From there, it could be as simple as enabling the Respond ICMP Echo (ping) Request from WAN setting in the Firewall controls for your AC-87U. Then have a cloud monitoring service try and ping your Dynamic DNS domain. If it gets a response, your WAN is up. If it fails, then alert. Plenty of variations on this, including exposing devices behind your firewall, but the concept is the same.

2. Have something within your network test the connection out. The most reliable solution is to run some sort of monitoring software on a computer on your network. (PRTG is a product I've used in the past and is free for small uses.) Only issue is, when the monitoring software finds the WAN is down, it still needs a way to alert you. If it can't access the internet, how's it going to do so? Your RT-AC87U supports Dual WAN, so you can always use a cellular data connection as a backup WAN, which would allow your monitoring solution to alert you if the primary WAN connection gets disrupted. One downside to this option is that it's possible your entire monitoring solution may get taken down if, say, there's a power outage. So you'd need your computer on a UPS battery backup that will keep it alive long enough to send the alert.

#1 definitely seems easier.

Ditto

Well, it's not very hard to come up with a small script to run on your computer that pings some host in the internet (say, Google DNS, 8.8.8.8) 5 times, and it if get 0 replies it opens up some media player to play a siren

Actually you can also run such a script on your Asus router, though it might be a bit more tricky to get it to play a siren with no speakers, but if I needed that at my home I could make it blink the lights through my Phillips Hue bridge

LordHamster

My 6 year old son + his Netflix account do a pretty good job of notifying me of outages.