I also have redundant WAN at my house, slightly less sophisticated. Comcast (primary) and U-Verse (backup) on separate modems (wired only, no WiFi). When an outage incident occurs, and it gets escalated, I received a page (iMessage from family member, "Dad, the WiFi is down!"). If I'm away from the NOC/DC, I call the DC remote hands support line (call onsite family member), and have them perform a hard cutover ("go to back of the device with the antenna thingies, disconnect the BLUE cable and plug in the YELLOW cable").
I do have a UPS on the modems and main access point.. but after reading this post, I may invest in diesel generator and a 5,000 gallon subterranean tank.
OP is using CenturyLink fiber. I don't know if things have improved in the two years since I moved from Tacoma, WA where I had it, but it was dreadfully unreliable back in 2016. The unreliability wasn't caused by the fiber drop itself but rather, by a super shitty oversubscription issue up in their Tukwilla/Seattle exchange.
Their IPv6 situation was even worse. They used 6rd and I swear, the translation box was probably a single router or Linux box with a 100 Mbit NIC in a rack somewhere. If you bothered enabling 6rd, every v6 site would be awfully slow. Even the browser projects to automate the selection of v6/v4 didn't help.
When I finally moved away and cancelled the service, I mailed my modem back as directed. A few months later, they sent my account to a collections agency over the cost of a modem, which their system claimed to have not received. I spent hours on endless phone calls but ended up just paying them the $250 or whatever to save my credit and stop the madness.
Seriously, they were the worst provider I ever had.
I have Century Link fiber in Seattle and the internet experience has been good. They do keep charging me for 2(!) modems, though--one that I mailed back and one that I never had. Every six months or so I call them up and they credit the erroneous charges back to my account and remove the modems. Invariably the modem charges show back up 1-3 months later. I'm pretty sure this is some sort of procedural dark pattern meant to rip off everyone audacious enough to bring their own modem but not routinely check their bill.
I wish some attorney would initiate a class action over this. Attorneys file class action lawsuits over all sorts of petty charges all of the time and win. Reading these comments, this certainly feels like a pattern. The dollar amounts involved are not small, either.
Same thing happened with me and Time Warner Cable in New York. Every six months they would mysteriously boost my rate. I would call into cancellations and they’r refund the erroneous charges, only to try again in six months. A letter to my Attorney General stopped that crap.
You threatened a lawsuit to a $8 an hour support rep. Do you think they really care? They just want you off the phone for metric reasons so they get a bigger raise.
Yep, I didnt a stint in one of samsung's global escalation centers and all the reps always rooted for people to threaten shit like this. Once you go legal there's no going back and Im no longer allowed to talk to you, only corporate counsel.
We all knew that 95% of all legal mumbo jumbo threats where all bark and no bite, and the other 10% was someone else's problem. So threaten away and know that you're making reps days.
Those ubiquitous "Turn on Auto-pay" buttons, in bright blue, are surely a hook into just such a hustle. How many people would bother to check the charges every month once they've signed up? Only the providers know for sure ...
That's crazy. I had the exact same experience, except for me they said the service had been cancelled, but then sent me a bill 3 months later for 3 months of back payment I "owed". And in my case I called and complained, but ended up just giving up and not paying.
They still come by to sell me fiber a few times a year, and I explain I would try again if they "forgive" the money I owe, the salesperson says "no problem", they spend 20 minutes on the phone to HQ, then say it's impossible :)
Oh yeah, and I had the exact same oversubscription issue. The service was fast as hell, until the middleschoolers got home at 2:30ish, then it slowed to almost unusable speeds.
My experience with them in Seattle has been relatively positive; no IPv6 slowness, good and consistent throughout overall. Moving inside of Seattle was mindbogglingly difficult for some reason and involved a 3 hour phone call with 10+ transfers and several layers of escalation just to confirm they serviced my new house... but once that was out of the way no issues.
I have Century Link in Seattle. IPv6 is laggy as hell even though internet speed tests report >400Mbps. They also mysteriously doubled my service fee 10 months in. Comcast had better latency and less "billing-anomalies"
When I moved between apartments in NYC, Time Warner Cable internal systems got very confused somehow. I had working internet at the new address, and was only being billed for the new address, but the old address was still under my name somehow, so the people who moved in could not get service. I was called by a TWC sales rep to ask me to call TWC support to clear this up for the new tenants. TWC support transferred me between accounts-management and network-tech multiple times, they were all confused. Took about 2 hours of active question/response. (I went through it to make sure I wouldn't get some mystery/impossible bill in the future.)
IPv6 is faster on Centurylink Fiber than IPv4, by a good 25 to 30ms (eg: local servers will be 2ms to 3ms over IPv6, or 27ms to 33ms via IPv4). This is primarily due to much more open peering policies for IPv6, they peer with Hurricane Electric in Seattle on IPv6 (but not via IPv4), HE has established itself as a critical peer for IPv6 (which benefits me greatly!).
Not sure if you'll see this, but - maybe you should see if you can find an IPv6 datacenter/hosting provider within short throw (tens to hundreds of miles) of the peering center, and VPN all your traffic!
(Hm. Bandwidth costs might throw that idea out the window, but it might be absolutely worth it for gaming - or maybe you could sign up for game server v6 alpha/beta testing, heh)
Heh, I do read most replies. To answer your question, I do VPN some latency sensitive stuff (and the free wifi I offer) to nearby servers as I have a few dozen TB of extra bandwidth included in my $30/month resource pool with 'em.
They have had persistent peering issues with YouTube, too, causing abnormally slow speeds.[1] Another tier 1 ISP making their customers suffer so they can shake down content providers for bandwidth fees.
Oh well, let's keep gifting them billions in CAF funding to build out more poorly-maintained private networks and allow more monopoly mergers with other tier 1 providers. I'm sure that'll help and not cause decades of stagnation.
As a primarily urban provider, CenturyLink almost certainly pays more into the CAF than it gets out of it. (CAF is money is collected from all ILECs and redistributed to rural ILECs).
Over IPv6 they have direct peering with Hurricane Electric in Seattle, which brings local latency down to 2 to 3ms. Performance for Youtube & Netflix is way better over IPv6 too, but in some edge cases I'll tunnel through a VPS in downtown to get close to filling my pipe when downloading stuff from overseas.
Reliability wise, I've had 1 outage in two years, which happened at 1am on a weekday for slightly under 2 hours due to a PPPoE Aggregator failing. Far better than Comcast or Wave ever were, and at our usage I don't think either of the cable providers would be viable. We hit 12TB last month iirc, not even a peep from Centurylink.
Fair enough. I've only had personal experience with CenturyLink's DSL service which in comparison to their fiber is abysmal. I'm probably letting my anger towards CenturyLink's poor stewardship of rural copper and the gov't rewarding them with free CAF money cloud my judgment.
Centurylink needs to get their worthless trash (aka copper) off the poles, the only way they'll gain and retain customers is with modern infrastructure (not ADSL like they've stranded so many areas on) and reasonable billing practices. VDSL2 is moderately competitive where its deployed, but old non-serviced areas like my part of Seattle (which never saw DSL) or poorly serviced areas on ADSL need to see upgrades immediately if Centurylink is to retain profitability on its non-carrier services side of the business.
I am not hugely familiar with how wholesale traffic works on the internet but I am a bit suprised to hear about different routing between IPv4 and IPv6. Isn’t any network hardware manufactured in the past 10 or 15 years dual stack? Surely by now we must be close to 100% IPv6 ready on the backbones. Why would there be a different route for v6 packets?
That is on Residential service, mostly Sling & Netflix. When I was on Centurylink's Prism IPTV product (which is great BTW (besides pricing), best linear TV experience out there, instant channel switching and live view of the last 5 channels you watched) we would regularly use in excess of 15TB as the IPTV traffic was constant unless you turned the STB off on each TV.
Right, I mustn't have been thinking properly - that's only about 36 megabits per second sustained. If that's multicast or from a local-ish node (which IPTV probably is), it's nothing.
Well, it was UDP Multicast when we were with Centurylink's IPTV, but now all that bandwidth has to transit an IX or transit provider.
Speaking of UDP Multicast, PFSense dropped all support for it without warning before updating, which was the end of me using PFSense at home as it broke TV until I could replace it with OpenWRT.
Nope, that is minor portion of my traffic, nearly all of it is Sling with a bit of Netflix. Turns out high quality streaming video being left on 24/7 on multiple screens burns a ton of bandwidth :P
Bandwidth is ephemeral, if you don't use it now, its not as though it will pile up and be usable later. With Fiber, there is no good reason to moderate usage, I'd be more concerned with the few watts the endpoint burns (which costs sub-$10 a year) than an extra TB of usage.
I had the identical experience when they first launched and started heavily promoting their fiber to the home in seattle a year or two back. Same terrible v6 site performance, same oversubscription issues, and same "we never received the modem" claim. This claim didn't show up till about 2 months after I sent it in, by which time I no longer had my UPS tracking number. Seems like a real pattern with them and felt scammy even then.
> ... I may invest in diesel generator and a 5,000 gallon subterranean tank.
I highly recommend propane-fueled gensets. Fuel storage is much less hassle, and propane doesn't go bad. You won't get the runtime of a huge diesel tank. But there's often little point in that, because an extended power outage will also take down the telecom infrastructure. As I recall, a ~7kW genset at ~70% capacity went through ~40kg propane per day. That was running well pump, sump pump, refrigerator, CFLs, microwave, fans, and a ~3kW UPS for several computers.
Edit: Make sure to get a UPS that accepts genset power. That usually means full online aka double conversion. And everything must be grounded properly. Plus at least a manual transfer switch, to avoid injuring utility workers.
Diesel doesn't go bad, it can be stored for long periods of time. It's much cheaper to run a diesel generator than propane since diesel is much more energy dense but costs about the same.
How long? For people with decent electrical service, you need the genset for at most several hours, maybe once or twice a year. Your UPS should handle ~30 minutes, which is enough for most interruptions. So your fuel supply needs to be stable on the order of decades. Is diesel stable on that scale? And sure, propane can leak. So you need to check every few months.
Back in my Nexus 5 days while on t-mobile all you had to do was tell the phone to use the same gateway IP for tethered traffic as mobile traffic. Quick ADB command later unlimited tethering.
Same but it's very easy to bypass. Just install a proxy on your phone and set your system proxy to the phone in your OS. Then all the connections look like it comes from your phone as the PC is using the phone as a http proxy.
Ya same here, With my two additional power banks, which costed 20$ each, I am looking at 2 days of backup. And there is unlimited data (5gb/day/highspeed) that is enough for most uses. For additional usage if any, like a big Xcode update I can top up the data plan with additional 5gb for few dollars.
I have redundant wireless at my house - fios for primary and t-mobile for backup. It's not a seamless handoff because I have to turn on the hotspot on my phone.
Hey how can i learn more about all this? id love to understand whates going on, on the github page, im following a bit but still want a better understanding the way you and the rest of the commenters have, what are some good starting points?
Any resources, books, links, youtubes especially, that you can point me to?
Also, in his set up, theres no router? He says hes using a VM? What does that mean?
Go to your router's config page, and google all the words/acronyms you don't know. Read the Wikipedia pages too. That should put you in a position where you can ask better questions.
Router is a generic term for something that takes wired Ethernet and performs NAT and creates a wifi network( something an access point aka AP does). The NAT here is handled by a different device(the by the 'VM', which is a program that runs an entire OS by simulating a computer) and the AP here is multiple UniFi devices[1].
I would say get familiar with googling technical terms, because there won't always be someone willing to answer questions
> Router is a generic term for something that takes wired Ethernet and performs NAT and creates a wifi network
not to nitpick, but this not actually true. for home use, perhaps it is conflated to mean this, but really it is one machine that reroutes traffic on behalf of another - NAT/wifi or other media transformation is not necessarily required here (though definitely could be a part of it)
Well a router takes a packet from one of its interfaces and uses the Internet Protocol address encoded in the packet header to determine which of its interfaces to forward the packet to based on the preconfigured destination subnet for the interface. Most home routers only have two interfaces and two subnetworks.
Most people are familiar with home routers which do Network Address Translation and have a built in Wireless access point. Neither of those things are required for something to be a router. In fact routers with IPv6 support do not perform NAT between your local network and the Internet for IPv6.
Similarly, DHCP, DNS, and various other things that home routers do can actually be handled by totally separate hosts on the network. That's what he's doing.
If you're looking for more information about how networking works, I would highly recommend Computer Networks by Andrew Tanenbaum. It's more abstract than the typical "Understand TCP/IP in 600 pages" books that are available but it provides a good high-level overview of how networking works, what protocols matter, and how everything fits together.
Edit: When he says he's using VMs, he means that he's using Virtual Machines to run multiple operating systems on the same server. Each of these operating systems runs one or more servers for DHCP or DNS or other networking services. I assume that he's using his virtualization platform to mirror the virtual machines between his servers and provide hot spares, so that if one VM goes down another spare can step in.
The VM is a router. Provided you ensure that traffic has to go through the VM and that the VM is able to route etc then it is a router 8) OP is using Linux whereas pfSense is FreeBSD based but pfSense is pretty much the only (near enough) turnkey product that does multi WAN and CARP properly. I should mention OPNsense as well here for fairness.
Fair enough. For a laugh I searched for "vm" and got a wikipedia article on virtual machines. GP did ask for rather a lot of clarification but then you (we) still have to allow for those times when someone just does not get it, despite everything.
For example, I'm diving into Home Assistant, I don't think I'm daft but I ended up posting what turned out to be a really silly request for help because I was not a local and used to the scenery. I'd read all the docs, which I will soon subtly alter, but missed an implied (if you knew the system) point.
How the heck do you describe what a VM router does, quickly? 8)
Well too late now but this is why you either hand it in to a human and get a receipt or you send it via certified or registered mail because that'll hold up in court.
It's unfortunate anyone has to go through so much trouble to prove to Century Link what their inventory system is probably telling them anyway but it's always best to protect yourself.
> 5,000 gallon subterranean tank.
...about 19,000 litres.
That seems like tremendous overkill. Are you also planning on using that for home heating? If not, it seems like a very large maintenance burden for anything other than some kind of survival scenario.
So you are committed to paying for the remote hands and can't get out of it, or have already fully paid for lifetime support from the remote hands and can't get a refund :)
That doesn't mean that there can't be cost savings from automation. For example if it costs X in lost business due to a misunderstanding by the remote hands that extends the outage unnecessarily, then a certain number of times avoiding that X cost would pay for the investment in automation. You pay the "sunk" and the new cost but you avoid unnecessary costs in the long run.
It's all a matter of fully modeling your costs and benefits. Noting that certain costs are sunk is a partial model.
From 5 minutes of Wikipedia reading, it appears this requires special support from the router to enable “sticky sessions” which prevent out-of-order packets; or, the device OS itself can “stripe” packets across NICs with special (extra) software to enable that.
>I do have a UPS on the modems and main access point.. but after reading this post, I may invest in diesel generator and a 5,000 gallon subterranean tank.
I'm not sure if that's a joke or not, mainly because after reading it I'm thinking "It's a stupid idea, but ... no it's a really stupid idea, but ..."
I do have a UPS on the modems and main access point.. but after reading this post, I may invest in diesel generator and a 5,000 gallon subterranean tank.