Interesting to see that. It turns out that around a month ago after seeing the Raspberry Pi project that send a tweet to Comcast when internet connection is slow, it gave me the motivation to use my Raspberry Pi 2 to do the following:
A- every 15 minutes check my internet connection: connectivity (reaching Goodle DNS host),
B- if connectivity fail, execute D-2 below, if not see next step below
C- then use SpeedTest download / upload; if download/upload speed are too slow then attempt a second test 30 seconds later
D- if the second attempt fail again then:
1- send an SMS with Twilio to my cell phone to let me know the modem will reboot, and wait 10 seconds
2- issue a "off" command to my Belkin Wemo (cable modem plugged into it), then wait another 30 seconds and issue a "on" command
On top of that I have installed InfluxDB + Grafana on my Pi so I can log the connection latency to Google DNS, and the download/upload speed. Example:
The Belkin Wemo command do use only my local Wifi, so even if the modem is down since my Pi is on the same LAN it can control the Wemo without problem.
It was a fun little project for my Pi. All written in Python. If anyone interested I can probably post the code somewhere.
Would be nice if this information was more visible.
I was quite surprised that the link leads to some random G+ page about "smartplug" hacking while people here are talking as if it was a commercial product.
Thanks! My work requires using a certain device which I figured how to use remotely but occasionally it needs a reboot and the devices I found were very expensive.
I can't imagine what they have a patent pending on. They could claim nobody has put all of these features into a single device, but I'd challenge even that. WiFi switches have been around for a long time and there's a myriad of open projects for a variety of "development platforms" (RPi, Arduino, etc) that do things like this or similar to this. As far as detecting and cycling a device based on network activity, I've personally built something that performs this exact function ten years ago using an old laptop with an X10 serial device and a router/modem plugged into an X10 device. There's got to be a ton of prior art out there.
A neat idea but why not take that $60 and buy a router that didn't require resetting. They do exist. My Asus router just never needs reset. I have it on an ups unit and the only time it is reset is to do firmware upgrades.
I love my MikroTiks. Even the $22 "hAP lite" is a fantastic home WiFi router option, and comes with all the functionality a hacker could want.
My MikroTik's fantastic reliability (48d uptime, and that was b/c I accidentally pulled the power cord), combined with a queue policy to throttle bandwidth to avoid my ISP's humongous queues, makes me feel sorry for others whenever I hear them complain about their router always crashing, or Netflix causing Minecraft to lag.
Its not always the router though. I remember living in a shared flat a while back, and whenever one girl connected her laptop to the network, it would mess up wireless for everyone. I seem to remember the fix needing applied to her computer, as I have never done anything to the software on a router.
That's great. An equally good product to this plug might be an oracle that can tell you how good a router's software was, and improves it if it is not decent.
That's why return periods exist. So you can see if something works well or not. You don't need an oracle to know that you should return a router that malfunctions when someone starts connecting to it.
The oracle is needed to see if the router works well or not in all possible configurations of connected clients the router will face during its lifetime...
...so that you can return it during the return period.
Look at the brands that focus on quality/software vs. releasing new models every 3 months.
In my experience Pepwave/Unifi/Microtik are good prosumer brands.
For more consumer-y stuff, it might be worth it to have a look at the Apple/OnHub routers too.
You can also pick up enterprise gear on eBay at pretty good prices, brands such as Cisco/HP/Aerohive/Ruckus etc., but configuring/updating might be a pain.
I can't speak from experience for most of these, but I just bought some Ruckus APs and have been through review hell. The Ruckus APs were clear winners; the reviews (of the R500 and R600) were glowing and said the devices were easy to configure. (They're also very expensive.) They haven't arrived yet, so I can only recommend them based on my research, not based on experience.
I'm replacing a hodgepodge of hardware, including some Apple routers and APs. The Apple products worked reasonably well. I had to keep them fairly isolated (for heat) or else they required reboots. But given their price point, I would probably look somewhere else.
Throughput was a major complaint for many reviewers of the Unifi models I researched. No individual reviewer convinced me the units themselves were the problem, but the sheer number of such reviews did.
Peplink's Pepwave units look awesome and were my second choice.
For all the others, I could either not find enough reviews to reach any conclusions or could not find a model that fit my needs.
One caveat with Amazon products reviews. With any products that have unusually high 5*s, search for term 'exchange' and lookout for lines like : 'I received this product at a discounted price in return for my unbiased review.' I got bad experience with multiple such products.
The people writing these reviews definitely seem to start with positive, since they got the stuff for free or discount!
No idea if they're available outside of Germany, but my ISP-supplied Fritz!Box has been rock solid for years. Only complaint is that the wifi signal isn't very strong.
This is after several terrible experiences with expensive name-brand home routers, which I agree are usually trash.
You can add ANY wifi router to ANY ethernet network. You absolutely are not required to use a wifi device that your ISP gives you. The WAN side is under their control, but you can do anything you want on your side.
Of course, then you've just added a second point of failure - their crappy router can still bring down your connection, but now so can the additional router you've added.
Obviously it is possible to increase the TTL of incoming traffic if that's what you wanted to know. Linux iptables can do that, IIRC BSD pf too, and some consumer routers even have an option in the GUI.
Just buy a new router if you have a buggy one that needs restarted all the time.
This is silly and illogical, if you have a reliability problem fix it, adding more parts is not likely to help. What happens when this smart plug malfunctions and restarts your router every 5 minutes?
> What happens when this smart plug malfunctions and restarts your router every 5 minutes?
It's obvious, you get another gadget which bypasses the plug when it switches off despite network being up. Capacitors in the router will keep it running for the few milliseconds it takes to enable bypass.
Agreed. Without naming the brand of router I have in an effort to not start a brand debate, I must say when you actually end up spending more than $40 on a wireless router, the quality greatly improves. When I lived with my family, I thought resetting wireless routers was the norm (all my friends agreed it was a normal thing). Then I moved out and bought my own equipment. 5 years and counting and the only time this thing has been power cycled is when my home lost power in a storm.
You'd be far better off putting the money you'd spend on this gadget towards a better wireless router and call it a day.
> I thought resetting wireless routers was the norm (all my friends agreed it was a normal thing).
Trust me, hanging or rebooting is the best of the bad things your router can do to you.
I had one which would pass LAN->WAN packets without NAT translation if the endian-swapped destination address matched the LAN address block. Want to access X.1.168.192 on default settings? Sorry, not today.
And, of course, I didn't use 192.168.1.0/24 but 10.0.0.0/8. It took me weeks to figure out that the thing those few websites which suddenly stopped working had in common was IPs ending with .10 .
This was few years ago and since then I haven't bought a single router which wouldn't run OpenWRT or at least DD-WRT.
Sometimes the ISP mandates the modem/router, it has to be the one they give you. And in my case, trying to change it is more trouble than it's worth. Before you ask, there isn't such a great choice in ISPs here either...
For half the price you could buy a Raspberry Pi that just runs a simple watchdog program doing the internet connectivity check. Upon a problem, it could connect to your modem's web admin page and launch a restart from there.
See my other post where I am using my Pi and reset my Wemo... Initially I was going the route to reboot the modem through the web interface until I noticed my stupid modem doesn't offer such option in the web interface! Since I had a spare Wemo Plug I was not using for a while I used that instead.
I'm a little skeptical about this product having had experience with some of these WiFi plug devices and as echoed by others, the price of this device is much higher than it should be.
I've been using Ankuoo and Maginon devices quite a bit at home -- they run around $25, are easy to setup, conveniently communicate information to Chinese owned domains (ok, that bit bugs me, but I've blocked the communication) and they are a script away from this product.
If this is based on the Marvell Chipset that so many of these devices are based on, I wonder how frequently it'll reset the router not because WiFi went out but because the device dropped off the network due its own problems. I've had some very spotty results with a device that I had plugged into the same power strip as my router and a large number of other devices. Despite being 4 feet from the router, it continually dropped off the network until I moved it to a wall outlet far away from the power strip (I'm guessing interference from the myriad of moderately high wattage equipment I had plugged in but I'm no EE).
Something like this could be made on-the-cheap with a CHIP and a relay ($10 for the CHIP $5-10 for the relay, $~1-5 for USB power) and a little bit of scripting. Personally, I've wanted a feature like this since my router and cable modem are not easy to get to when I (rarely) need to cycle them. I purchased a 4-port relay and plan to pair it with a Banana Pro, wire it to Ethernet, set it up on WiFi and coupled with software running on my OpenWRT router, have it decide which to cycle in the event of an outage. Even with that complex of a build, I'm looking at $55.00 including power (which doesn't count much for me since I've got a USB block with an available port that I plan to use).
The WiFi may work without the internet working. Is there a plug that checks that? I get a lot of outages on the internet link side of things, not so many on the local wireless.
I imagine the costs are negligible, because the average person is probably only going to call once or twice and be told to reboot the router (which works), before they just start rebooting it on their own whenever they have a problem.
This is one of those ingenious inventions that make you ask: "Where have you been all of my life".
Perfect for coffee shops, or when the router's in a room that you can't access without waking anyone up.
Of course in an ideal world, wireless routers would be smart enough to reset themselves, without having to add another $60 to their price. But we are only in 2016.
No, in an ideal world companies would stop making cheap, untested consumer shit that degrades after a few weeks uptime (looking at you, TP-Link). Luckily products unlike these exist, but not many might know about them, so this is a completely unnecessary product (hilariously overpriced as well) profitting from the ignorance of end users...
I second both the observation about TP-Link and the existence of products that have no market in an ideal world. And TP-link really cannot have excuse as OpenWRT on their hardware is more stable, so by producing custom software they wasting money.
The halting problem doesn't say that you can never prove that any given program won't ever halt, just that some programs (written in a Turing-complete language) are undecidable. You can write a program which can be proven will or won't ever halt.
But the typical solution to this particular problem is to correctly employ a watchdog[1] that will restart your program if it halts. In fact, this wifi-monitoring plug is serving as a watchdog itself.
You can also add a watch scripts that pings a known address and if does not work it reboots the router. Zero hardware required which is better than throwing electronic waste in the environment.
A super cheap way to do this is proactively reset your router every night at 3am by power cycling it with a $12 plug-in timer. Of course it doesn't fit every use case and it doesn't solve every problem , but it will alleviate problems related to long running that all to many routers seem to suffer.
Where/when do you live guys ? Who buys a router that needs to be restarted (and even fails) ? :) I have a Netgear something that acts as a wifi router and I do not have to restart it, I don't understand :)
I reboot it about once a year, as in, it has been rebooted three times that didn't involve firmware updates in its entire life, or about five times total.
If your router is that flakey, just replace the router.
I've never had a problem with TP-Link over about the last ten years and 3 modem/routers. I have heard lots of other people complaining about them though.
What’s different about your setup? Do you filter electricity with an uninterruptible power supply? Cable lengths? No other equipment nearby? Good ventilation?
I have a pair of TP-Link WDR-3600s. Both run OpenWRT "Barrier Breaker" and they've been rock-solid. One is on a filtered UPS (the main router), but the other one is just plugged into the wall and usually has a loaf of bread on top of it (the wireless relay in the pantry). Both have been fine, so I don't think it's the power supply.
I currently have a TD-W8960N that's been running 24/7 for about 3 years. Only a couple of outages which were due to ISP issues. Ventilation is nothing special, its just sitting on a shelf. No UPS, but the power board its plugged into does have some limited amount of power spike filtering I believe. Cable length from modem to phone socket on wall is less than 50cm. It shares the socket with an ADSL2+ line filter splitter and a standard telephone. Got about 10 WiFi devices in the house sharing access.
To summarize: many consumer level routers tend to lock up due to firmware bugs, hardware defects, or overheating. Because they're closed devices, the solution is usually power off/power on & let the restart clear up any issues and restore proper wifi functionality. This device ingeniously automates that step.
A- every 15 minutes check my internet connection: connectivity (reaching Goodle DNS host),
B- if connectivity fail, execute D-2 below, if not see next step below
C- then use SpeedTest download / upload; if download/upload speed are too slow then attempt a second test 30 seconds later
D- if the second attempt fail again then:
1- send an SMS with Twilio to my cell phone to let me know the modem will reboot, and wait 10 seconds
2- issue a "off" command to my Belkin Wemo (cable modem plugged into it), then wait another 30 seconds and issue a "on" command
On top of that I have installed InfluxDB + Grafana on my Pi so I can log the connection latency to Google DNS, and the download/upload speed. Example:
https://imgur.com/gallery/dgeFR
The Belkin Wemo command do use only my local Wifi, so even if the modem is down since my Pi is on the same LAN it can control the Wemo without problem.
It was a fun little project for my Pi. All written in Python. If anyone interested I can probably post the code somewhere.
[updated for formatting]