Lots of beer and a book

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.

I plugged a mobile stick into my FritzBox and use cellular. I only tested this, never actually needed it.

Reading 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.

Would a sim backup not solve this? Could be in a router, could be in an old phone

If you are hosting everything, why do your need your ISP? Is it for access to your home services outside your home?

If the internet or power goes out I read a book.

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.

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 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.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

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]

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

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.

Cheap and cheerful 4G plugged into my Proxmox server, mapped to a secondary WAN interface for OPNsense.

I ain't gamin over it, but I will be connected.

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.

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 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 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