So now we all have our cool automated house humming away and allowing us to control everything remotely. All the benefits of home control, security cams and alarm systems all at our fingertips anywhere in the world. life is good until…your ISP goes down. Now you are totally untethered from any of your home devices and cams while vacationing 5000 miles from home.
So far, I have not seen this issue addressed in this forum. At least I could not find anything, so the question is, what method can be set up that can monitor your ISP status? Upon an ISP disconnect, then how to send a text to your hand phone alerting you to this failure?
There must be a way to set this up. This has happened twice to me in the past 2.5 months as I sit 8000 miles away from my house located in China. Remotely I maintain 3 seperate ways to connect to my HA system, but ALL of course relay on an Internet connection. I need to know as soon as my ISP provider has gone down. Maybe a phone dialing out and sending a text msg? Can the ISP service itself send me a text? Install a cellular backup system locally and some sort of device to monitor your ISP active connection?
It is impossible for Vera to notify you of anything if Vera’s internet connection is down. Therefore, if you must use Vera for this, you must provide her with an alternate internet connection for the notification to get out on.
You have already provided workable answers to your question. Though I doubt the ISP will contact you when there is an outage, you can certainly ask them. However, it is my opinion that Vera is a poor choice for network monitoring. Likewise, the other options you suggested seem either overly complex or expensive if your goal is simply notification. There are, in my opinion, many better tools for such a function. For instance you could use a network monitoring tool like Nagios to monitor your remote site’s internet connection. You may even be able to utilize an online services for this, such as Pingdom.
I am curious about your need for immediate notification. What can you do or do you hope to do about the service outage? If you want to reboot your modem/router, then a ping monitor on Vera should suit your needs. If your concern is for alarms, then a cellular backup is likely the best/only option worth considering. I can;t think of anything else that would require such urgent notification.
I know this doesn’t answer your initial question directly, but on my home alarm I use the EVL3 alarm communication module for my DSC alarm. Once communication is lost to the device it will notify my within a short time that it’s lost communication with the module, I also get a similar alert from my Honeywell wifi thermostat.
I think that is along the lines of what you are asking for in the form of alerts from Vera. It’s not the end of the world for me if I lose communication to the MCV but I guess I technically have a work around that notifies me when communication is lost. Maybe other will have some suggestions or other work arounds.
Although I’d prefer an alternate path my AT&T uVerse Gateway doesn’t appear to want to be able to support a 4G/LTE alternate
So I’m trying to come up with the next best thing, notification. Obviously if the Gateway or the link to AT&T is down none of the existing notifications like Pushover, Vera Alerts, etc., will work. So I’ve installed two Ping Sensors, one to ping the local Gateway the other pings the uplink router at AT&T. These Ping Sensors are processed in a PLEG. IF BOTH are responding the PLEG sets a Virtual Switch “Internet Avail” ON. If EITHER Ping Sensor is failing the PLEG sets the VS to OFF.
I have AutoVera and Tasker running on an “old” Smartphone so the phone can send an SMS under control of Tasker. Tasker has two Event Profiles running, one for Internet UP and one for Internet DOWN. AutoVera on the phone will be notified by the AutoVera Plug in when the VS state changes. The corresponding Tasker Profile fires a Task that sens an SMS to my phone “Internet Available” or “Internet Unavailable”.
I’m quite confident this will work but right now I have a problem with the Plug in updating the Android. I am running TWO Vera 3 units in a Bridged environment and I suspect AutoVera has a problem in this case. The Ping Sensors, PLEG, VS and an AutoVera Plug in are running on the Secondary and for some reason the phone AutoVera is not updated when the state of the VS changes.
So I’m hoping that I can resolve this problem and get the system working. However, if you only use one Vera then it SHOULD work for you “out of the box” so to speak
I have Uverse too. I can configure Uverse for passthrough mode. It means you essentially have two internet routers (the uverse becomes basically just a media converter).
The new router becomes the default gateway and can either send traffic to the uverse or a 3g/4g conenction (with a router that supports 3g/4g via a usb dongle).
You guys posted some interesting workaround a here. Thank you all for that. I will study some of the links posted and try to figure out what seems best for me that I can put together in China.
FYI, I think I found a solution. And it’s cheap and simple!
All I need to do is get a 3G USB dongle. Buy anywhere from $20~60. I plug it into my RT-N66U router’s USB port and I’m done. The ASus has a setting for using a 3G/4g dongle built in. When it detects a WAN connection failure, it activates the USB dongle and my network is up and running. When the WAN returns, it switches off.
Or… you can make Vera use an Android Cell phone to send out an SMS. Tasker and AutoRemote needs to be installed on the phone. Autoremote’s Wifi Service needs to be running.
