Bell Fibre Internet is awesome however the HomeHub 3000 router they provide is rubbish. Recently we were away from home when there was an internet outage requiring a router reboot fix.

Have you tried turning it off and on again. IT Crowd

Our home is smart so losing Internet while we’re away caused a few problems;

  • The front door camera was not accessible to we couldn’t check if packages had arrived
  • The thermostat was not accessible so we couldn’t warm the house before our arrival
  • The Plex (self hosted Netflix) server went down we I had to read a book
  • We couldn’t run the vacuum cleaner prior to our arrival or drive it around the house to check for post storm damage

After a bit of research I decided on the Watchdog for Wi-Fi router approach with a few tweaks. I built a version of Tasmota with USE_PING, USE_EXPRESSION, & SUPPORT_IF_STATEMENT enabled. USE_PING allows me to write Tasmota Rules based on the response of network pings. USE_EXPRESSION, & SUPPORT_IF_STATEMENT were added in case more complex Rules were required later. For instance, adding the ability to ping multiple servers to check for network connection. I flashed a Sonoff switch with my build of Tasmota version 9.1.0 using Tasmotizer. Then connected the switch to my router’s wifi network and in line power supply.

In the console;

Set the PowerOnState to 1 so that the router would turn on after a power outage

PowerOnState 1

Then added a rule which sends 8 pings to 1.1.1.1 every 120 minutes and if there are 0 successful responses, it powers off the router for 15 seconds, then powers it back on. I choose a 2 hour cadence because a 2 hour outage is fine for my use case and I didn’t want to risk a reboot loop if 1.1.1.1 stopped responding to my pings.

Rule1
  ON Time#Minute|120 DO Ping8 1.1.1.1 ENDON
  ON Ping#1.1.1.1#Success==0 DO Backlog Power1 0; Delay 150; Power1 1; ENDON

Finally I enabled Rule 1.

Rule1 1

I’ll try this approach out for a while and if reboots become too frequent I will use the USE_EXPRESSION, & SUPPORT_IF_STATEMENT to check multiple sites before initiating a reboot.