Just wondering if anyone knows what to do when your internet goes down. Sometimes my internet goes down in the middle of the night. Is there a way to be notified if your net goes down? Problem is when it goes down my api shuts off. If the net comes back up a few minutes later I need to restart my api but I am sleeping and dont even know this has happened until morning. Any suggestions appreciated.
you can get a dual WAN router [Syswan 24] for $179 and free shipping from Amazon. Tether your cellphone for a the second WAN and it will failover to the cell connection... Not sure but I think I read that it can email you when a failover occurs as well...
Yeah you should have a dual connection. Instead of a cellphone you can also get one of those USB sticks for 3G or whatever connection a mobile provider might offer you. That way it can fall back to that connection. If you cant make the fallback work, you can at least have another computer monitor the main one with the API and send you an automated email when it goes down. There's many ways to do that. You might also be able to get multiple different ISPs to give you a connection and if they're not all down at the same time, it could work.
You didn't state how you want to be notified - if the internet goes obviously having your PC sending you an email is out. There are no shortage of programs out there that can monitor your ISP connection (perhaps as simple as pinging your ISP default gateway, or perhaps actually testing the connection to your broker would be more appropriate in your cast) and you can have that program play an "alert" sound on your PC when that happens....is that what you are looking for?
Thanks for the good ideas guys. Well in my area there are two main internet providers. Currently I am on cable which is usually pretty good. We also have telus in the area. I was going to get telus as well for a good backup. From what I have heard I would only be actually using one connection at a time so if my cable internet went down I would then have to connect with telus. The best thing for me would be if I could be connected to both at the same time so if the cable went down telus would already be on and therefore the api not log off. From what I have heard it would not work like that. If my cable went down I would then have to tell my computer to connect to telus. This is not good if I am sleeping. The other way I would do it. I would want my landline to get a phone call if my internet went down. Usually if the net goes down it is just for a short time. My landline has a loud ring so it will wake me up. Frustrating
Just make your computer "beep" repeatedly and if your speakers are not loud enough buy louder ones. What software environment are you using? Even if your setup doesn't support that I'll bet there's a creative way to do it.
It's my understanding that most dual-WAN routers will use both WANs at the same time, so you get double the bandwidth and redundancy. They will also do automatic failover. Unfortunately, your broker will probably not support automatic failover or multiple logins, so it rarely works the way we would like. Have you considered co-location? You would get a reliable Internet connection and automatic backups, etc. You would control your server remotely. Alternatively, maybe you could locate your app in the cloud.
MagnumPi, I use NetWorx a free utility to monitor my cable connection and set the Notifications to 1KB within 3 secs - that is no data within 3 sec and I get a sound alert with a popup. this sound alert will occur well before the modem's lights go out when there is a disconnection, and when that happens I change the notification from 3 secs to hours to shut the alarm off, then just watch the lights on the modem periodically until they're back up, then reset to 3 secs http://www.softperfect.com/products/networx/ 'Intruder-Alert' is the sound file I use, you could turn your speakers volume as high as they'll go and if there's a disconnection maybe the sound will wake you not sure if it's a 'guranteed to wake the dead' alarm ; http://soundbible.com/843-Intruder-Alert.html from what I've read about dual routers in the Hardware forum, my understanding is that since both feeds are running simultaneously - tho data routes from source can't be the same can they ? - when one goes down it's not a case of 'switching over to the other' it's just the one that goes down is no longer there. but the users do not report that the charting/order entry program they were using had to be re- started and logged into again, their program stayed online
None of the three dual-WAN routers I have tried for my home Internet connection have actually worked all that well. Maybe because they were all on inexpensive side (less thatn $500).
Unless you are able to control both ends of a connection there is no way for a single TCP connection to use two different WAN connections, so on a per connection basis it either uses one ISP link or the other (not both). If the ISP link your brokerage connection is using goes down it has to reconnect using the other ISP link, it cannot automatically switch - the TCP protocol just doesn't work that way. Some brokers/api's might make this less painful (or perhaps even transparent) but from a network point of view its a brand new connection....