I had a 4G modem with a web interface many years ago. It was flaky and would often hang. I just had a raspberry pi on my network pinging some known address, if it failed for long enough it’d replay the commands to restart the web interface.

If I’d have the same problem today I’d probably have home assistant power cycle the router with a smart plug.

It didn’t happen in more than 5 years…

For critical equipment you need to spend the extra dollar to minimize this kind of stuff

I’ve moved my instant messenger onto a VPS and that has a good uptime. And I’m somewhat okay if my Nextcloud and calendars don’t sync. Most important data is synced anyway.

Other than that I’ve called my ISP a bunch of times to give me a new router, they refused, I canceled the subscription and made a new one and got a new router. And that one is better. And in doubt I’ll call a family member.

The term to look for is out of band management. Typically this will provide serial/console access to a device, and can often perform actions like power cycling. A lot of server hardware has this built in (eg idrac for Dell, IPMI generically). Some users will have a separate oobm network for remotely accessing/managing everything else.

On holiday, I’ll turn on my router’s auto-reboot option to reboot daily.

Its my house so ill just walk over and fix it.

If im out, nothing is too important enough that it cant be fixed in a couple of days.

So far it never happened but just in case I always leave one of my keys at some neighbors. I do it anyway because if something happens like broken pipe, it’s good when someone can just enter home without destroying our doors.

If you use a regular PC as the router you can attach a KVM to remote control and reboot it.

I have a Shelly plug that is programmed internally to turn itself on if off for 20 seconds. Home assistant turns the plug off for 10 seconds if curl ip.me fails for 15 minutes.

My modem is plugged into that.

I’ve never had a router or firewall crash if I wasn’t fucking with it and did something stupid ill-advised, so I don’t try that kind of stuff unless I’m home.

I’ve got one of those KeepConnect smart plugs which monitors a few different external servers and their own cloud, and automatically power cycles its outlet if things don’t work. They’ve damn near doubled in price since I’ve bought mine but it does work very well for me. Annual fee is reasonable too.

I could build something similar but I have too many projects as it is, and I feel I’d be fiddling with it endlessly just because I can. This is literally set and forget and in the last 2y it’s cycled the outlet 48 times, most of them in the middle of the night, presumably with my cable provider maintenance windows.

At the enterprise level an Opengear appliance fixes this.

Tripplite PDUs have an option to perform a ping test against an ip, and if it stops responding it can power cycle the outlet of your choice.

If you want to get fancy you can advertise routes from two routers into your L3 switch and if a route goes down your switch will use the backup.

Redundancy. I have two independent firewalls, each separately routing traffic out through two totally independent multi-homed network connections (one cable, one DSL, please god somebody give me fiber someday) that both firewalls have access to. For awhile was thinking of replacing the DSL with starlink until Elon turned out to be such a pile of nazi garbage, so for now DSL remains the backup link.

To make things as transparent as possible, the firewalls manage their IPs with CARP. Obviously there’s no way to have a single public IP that ports itself magically from one ISP to another, but on the LAN side it works great and on the WAN side it at least smooths out a lot of possible failure scenarios. Some useful discussions of this setup are here.

For me I’d just say oh well, gotta fix it when I’m home again.

Otherwise I’d probably write some script on the server, which reboots my router when the server either doesn’t have internet anymore or can’t ping itself.

• If your problem is brief brownouts or similar — my experience is that some consumer broadband routers have cheap power supplies that leaves them in bad states when PCs will pull through — you could put them on a UPS.

• If your problem is that your router is unstable, you could just replace your router. Like, if you need remote access and you have a flaky router, that seems like a prime choice.

• You could have a power control device or something and have another machine on your network set up so that if it loses Internet connectivity for some sustained period of time, it power-cycles the router.

• If this is for when you’re a long ways away, do you have a friend who you’d trust with a key and flipping a switch?

• I expect that there are business-oriented routers that will have integrated watchdog features that will auto-reboot if they hang. I have not gone looking, though.

• Possibly, if it’s compatible with your use case, and uptime is critical enough here, having a second, backup server elsewhere, possibly not self-hosted. I mean, your connectivity is always going to be bounded by the reliability of your residential Internet connection otherwise.

Old laptop with SIM card and some outbound remote access (eg logmein, Tailscale) is what some people I know use. But it’s an expense. I just have a reboot script.