I travel a lot. My FBox server keeps chugging away happily at home. If my hardware failed, it could be months before I could fix it. Having a VPS host my server is tempting but any time I look it seems like having 1T or more of storage is too costly if sufficient data storage is even available.
With the cost of hard drive storage as low as it is and only the bandwidth volume of a private server, are there options I am missing? Are others using Freedombox this way?
I’m in the same situation, and I’m still hosting my own for the same reasons. What I did was invest in better hardware and put some effort into configuration.
The big problem was with my cable modem. On restart the cable modem offers a DHCP lease before it is connected to the ISP. In this case FreedomBox would get a non-internet DHCP lease and afterwards never connect to internet. You can configure a specific DHCP server rejection, and after this that problem was solved. Look for my “rogue DHCP server” post. You’ll probably have this if your internet drops out randomly and then you have to restart FreedomBox to connect again.
Problem #2 is power loss. Servers frequently offer a “power on after power loss” option. Enabling this will restart FreedomBox without intervention. Make sure you have this if you want to get new hardware.
Problem #3 is the cable modem connection getting flaky over time. My ISP app and website can restart my cable modem from the remote side. That will clear this up in a few minutes.
This takes care of the most common problems for me. Check your FreedomBox BIOS to see if you have a power-on after power loss option. These three things dramatically improved FreedomBox availability for me.
Thanks for those points.
P1: I may have mine set up differently. My server uses an ip on my local lan but I confess this piece is above my pay grade. I should probably have it face the internet directly and handle routing for my lan, if that makes any sense at all.
P2: When I set up the old Gateway PC as a server a couple of years ago someone gave me a command line I used to set it so it restarts automatically when the power goes out and comes back on. I posted the command I used somewhere here back then. It is essential as our power goes out several times a year and it has coped with many power outages since. However my server quit yesterday. I don’t know why. There was no power outage. Apache was still responding with 500 errors but no Freedombox. I was able to get someone to drop in, power down the pc and restart it. That brought it back to life. It did the auto upgrade to 29.17 a few hours later and all seems well for now. I am at the End of the Earth now so it was nice there was someone there to respond to my call. It was that event that got me wondering about a VPS. I still have no idea what happened. I wonder if there are logs that would tell the story.
P3: Haven’t run across this but will now have a fighting chance to deal with it if it happens.
Cheers.
I should probably have it face the internet directly and handle routing for my lan, if that makes any sense at all.
That is exactly the idea. It works best this way, ISP routers are trash.
I cannot trust my data to be on a VPS, at best it might be ok to share files that are ciphered before they are sent to the server.
I run:
If a freedombox is still not working after power off and on and I am on travel, one option is to install a freedombox on a virtual machine on my laptop and restore a backup on it. I would do it mostly for email.
I currently have no functional solution for a connection loss. I tried Simple WAN Failover with 3G/LTE WWAN - Using a second router in the same LAN but it seemed to create a mess mon my network. I may try configuring mwan3.