No internet!

Woke up this morning to my phone being connected solely via its 5G connection, rather than our wifi. That’s weird. Also wireguard is down - doubly weird. Out of bed, and Sabriena goes “I think the internet is down” - yes it sure seems that way.

I look at the NTD, and there’s no optical light on it. I then remembered that we were supposed to have maintenance last night, so I checked and the window was from midnight to 6am, and given that it was about quarter past seven at this point, clearly something had gone very wrong.

Looking at the guides, I power cycled our router - even though it was clear it wouldn’t do any good. I then waited until 8 to call up tech support, where they informed me that yes, it was fine and probably even a good idea to power-cycle the NTD as well. Still no improvement, and at this point the tech asked me to confirm the sequence of lights: yes, power status light is green most of the time, the optical status light is dark, and the power status light periodically goes flashing which suggests it’s starting up. We did try a reset of the NTD, by holding the tiny reset button in with a paper clip.

No good, they’ll have to ask NBN to come out and check out the NTD, and the earliest appointment is Monday. We don’t have any confirmation or anything, but the speculation is:

Anyway, once I picked myself up out of the fetal position, I started thinking about what I’d do for work. I’d already tethered my phone to my work laptop which would get me through today. I looked to see if we could get a proper modem in town that would do 4g or 5g as a backup - I can, but at $250AUD I’m not sure I want to… our connection is generally fairly reliable and I can use my wireless hotspot for work.

Then around my lunch break I remembered that I have a very old TP-link WAP that can be configured as a wireless->ethernet bridge. I can turn off it’s WLAN, bridge it to my phone’s hotspot, and have everything on the network have access to the internet!

This worked, but with a few issues: first, the device is grossly out of date. It’ll get me through the weekend, but it’s not a permanent backup solution (entirely unsuitable for work). Second, it’ll be slow - for some defintion of slow. Third, there’s the possibility I’ll chew up all the saved up transfer quota on my mobile account doing this - I have 215GB free… but we’ve only used 400-ish for this month (8 days) so it seems quite likely that if we limited our downloads we could get through the weekend using up our phones after all.

The final issue would be I can’t have my phone in my pocket or near me, so I decided I would not set it up until after the work day was finished.

Update 2025-08-08: I set it up, it works, but keeps dropping off. I then tried Duncan’s iPhone, on the assumption that if we eat up his quota instead, it won’t matter as he never uses his phone. He approved this idea because I told him he can watch YouTube if he wishes - it’s his quota. Interestingly, his ancient iPhone XR performs much better, staying connected pretty much the entire time until it shuts off the hotspot after 8 hours or so? He did mention that the couple of Roblox games he tried were unplayable, but I did manage to stay connected to GTA Online without too much issues.

Also it’s interesting to note how well Mastodon handles sporadic connections. When we’re connected and the tailscale tunnel I set up for inbound connections (due to the fact that our mobile connections are CGNAT, so I can’t open an incoming port, much less 443) comes up, it immediately starts picking up new posts, sending the old ones, etc. The sidekiq queue on my end flushes out fairly quickly, maybe 45 minutes? I’m not sure what it looks like from another admin’s perspective, with my server throwing 502s for every request that isn’t in the cache, but I’m impressed.

Update 2025-08-11: Our technical visit window was from 8am til noon, so I skipped lunch and didn’t walk the dog today. Unfortunately, I got the SMS that the tech was on their way about 10 minutes before noon, and then a phone call shortly thereafter - he was busy helping someone out who had a medical connection, but he’d be there when he could, would I be around later? Sure, as much as I might rock back and forth and chant at the prospect of going additional days without a decent internet connection, someone with a “medical” connection likely has far greater needs than mine.

He finally made it out at about 4:30, and the visit was very quick. He brought in a tester to check the optical connection, disappeared out to his truck, grabbed another NTD, replaced it, put some numbers into the app on his phone, told us he’d wait into the driveway until it synced but if he drove off it’d be fine. He drove off, so I plugged the UDM-SE back in and we have internet again.

At one point he asked if I could throw the old NTD away for him, and I said sure… I was already thinking about taking it apart! Alas, he took it with him, so I don’t get to see what’s in them.

Horsham, VIC, Australia

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fwaggle

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Horsham, VIC, Australia

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