[isostatic]

> With my luck, it would catastrophically fail while out of town, leaving the wife and kids without internet.

Two ISPs, two networks. One called "main", one called "backup".

If "Main" fails, move over to "Backup", either with a cable, or on a different SSID.

[jerrysievert]

Where in some cases, the "Backup" is tethering with a smart-phone.

[JohnJamesRambo]

Are you advocating buying internet service from two different companies and paying for both every month in case one fails for a brief period of time?

[sangnoir]

> Are you advocating buying internet service from two different companies and paying for both every month in case one fails for a brief period of time?

That's not an unreasonable solution, considering most people already pay two ISPs (one fixed, and another for their phone/tablet). When your home wifi goes down, you're going to fall-back to your mobile anyway. I'm thinking of getting an extra data SIM, an LTE modem and do auto-failover.

--edit--

My needs are somewhat unique - my traveling laptop is on its last legs (and will be replaced by a cheap chromebook. Desktops/servers get better bang for the buck compared to laptops. Go figure!), so I tunnel onto a server at home for heavy-lift computing. If the internet fails when I'm not home, I'd be left stranded (and this has happened).

[giancarlostoro]

In my case my Surface Book 2 gives me all the firepower I need to not miss my desktop, and it also has a PCIE SSD on it like my desktop. I do agree, sometimes tethering is highly useful, at least in my case on my laptop. I try to keep as many things as offline capable as possible.

[jpk]

That's literally what the author of the article describes.

From a practical point of view I think it's silly to do such a thing for a residential situation, but I can appreciate using it as a learning experience for building systems like this.

[isostatic]

Depends how reliable your isp is ans how much it costs if it goes down.

3g is good enough backup for me, but for the office we go for two routers two isps and vrrp on the lan side, load balance across the wans, with failover to the other one.

[megous]

To be fair, mom probably will not be migrating VMs across three different supermicros and managing a ceph cluster to get a wifi connection.

I would not discount the possibility completely. But I judge it unlikely.

[isostatic]

If I wanted a seemless non-SPOF network for my family, I'd put in two mikrotiks, with the primary on mains, and secondary on UPS, £120 for a pair to do routing at a decent (1gig) speed on the main, and built in 4G on the reserve.

Then I'd put the primary router on the wired line, the other one on a 4G sim which did nothing but heartbeats unless the wired line went down. If the wired line shut down, traffic would reroute via 4G within 10 seconds or so. If the primary router went down, the backup router would take over in a similar time frame. Might put some capping on the 4G router to the netflix/etc boxes to keep bandwidth costs down.

UPS would be about 10W, so £45 for a 4 hour one. Possibly look at renewable energy of some sort to keep the UPS going during an extended outage.

I'd then VRRP on the lan side with primary on the main router (which would have a backup route via the secondary router)

Cloud based VM to do monitoring/alerting and land outgoing openvpn tunnels from both routers to allow secure remote access.

£170, £10 a month plus main ISP, and an hour of config.

However in reality having an ISP provided router and showing them how to tether in a problem works fine. OK, they lose their devices if the main circuit goes off, but running those over 4G can be pricey.