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Am I online?

I’ve recently changed my broadband provider and wondered how reliable they’d be. I figured I needed a way for my house to let me know whenever the connection had dropped and for how long for etc. Remembering my post a little while ago about
publishing to Twitter about local Bluetooth devices, I thought I could do something similar. So now I’ve written a little script (twitter-netcheck) that notices whenever my internet connection is dropped and then publishes to Twitter whenever it comes back. It also sends me a direct message so I get alerted by SMS or IM immediately. Quite handy I think - try it out for yourself

Posted by gareth on Saturday, April 5th, 2008 at 9:36.

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garethj 9 months ago 1 point
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Just testing the Disqus comment system thingy :)

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Andy Stanford-Clark 9 months ago 1 point
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problem with this is that it can only tell you when it's back ON line. What if it goes down forever? You'll never know! If you had an MQTT connection to a broker with a last will and testament that caused a message to be sent to twitter when the connection dropped THEN you'd have a cool solution :)
And the client could publish a birth certificate to say it's back online so you can have peace of mind.
:)

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garethj 9 months ago 1 point
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Yes, I did realise this at the time. Obviously with this approach I'd need a public server outside of my home which I don't have so this is a simple solution. Useful for recording problems after the event at least.

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Darren 9 months ago 1 point
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You should set it to email your ISP too, they'll love receiving all those messages.

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http://pointawayfromface.com

garethj 9 months ago 1 point
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Now that's a good idea! I'm sure they'd be happy to know of any problems I might be experiencing. Maybe I can link it directly with an online feedback form? :D

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Pete 8 months ago 1 point
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Pfft - just get a proper ISP :-)

Jon and I get text messages from Andrews and Arnold when our connections go down and come back, together with (in the latter message) total downtime. I've only had one "real" one though - usually it's because I've turned off the power to work on the house electrics, and it's spooky how my pocket buzzes within a second of hitting the switch.

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