I have Comcast Internet service at home. I’ve used it for many years now, and one of the constant things over this period of time has been that the service is quite often very unreliable. I’ve gone for months with no problems, and then for some weeks or months the service gets to be terribly unreliable.
What do I mean by unreliable? That is best described in terms of what the service is like when it is reliable.
- I can leave an ssh session to a remote machine up and running for days (say, an EC2 instance) – if I have keep-alive and things like that setup
- VPN sessions stay up for days without a problem
- The network is responsive, DNS lookups are quick, ICMP response is good, surfing the web is effortless, things like Netflix and Amazon movies work well
- Both IPv4 and IPv6 are working well
You get the idea. With that in mind, here’s what I see from time to time:
- Keeping an ssh session up for more than an hour is virtually impossible
- VPN sessions terminate frequently, sometimes it is so bad that I can’t VPN successfully
- DNS lookups fail (using the Comcast default DNS servers, 75.75.75.75, 76.76.76.76, 2001:558:feed::1, and 2001:558:feed::2). It isn’t any better with Google’s DNS because the issue is basic network connectivity
- There is very high packet loss even pinging my default gateway!
- Surfing the web is a pain, click a link and it hangs … Forget about streaming content
During these incidents, I’ve found that the cable modem itself remains fine, I can ping the internal interface, signal strengths look good, and there’s nothing obviously wrong with the hardware.
What I’ve found is that rebooting my cable modem generally fixes the problem immediately. Now, this isn’t always the case – Comcast does have outages from time to time where you just have to wait a few hours. But for the most part, resetting the cable modem just fixes things.
So I was wondering how I could make this all a bit better for myself.
An option is something like this. An “Internet Enabled IP Remote Power Switch with Reboot“. Or this, this, or this. The last one of those, Web Power Switch Pro Model, even sports a little web server, can be configured, and supports SNMP, and a REST API! Some of these gadgets are even Alexa compatible!
But, no – I had to solve this with a Raspberry Pi! Continued in Part 2.
Hype Cycles 