July 14, 201213 yr After 3 weeks of fighting with Comcast outages and 40% packet loss, they finally got their act together last night and I am back up. I want to put in a "warm" backup rather than my ad-hoc laptop-modem-windows-connection-sharing kludge. Many (way too many) moons ago, I did set up a Linux box to route Internet traffic out over a dialup modem via ppp. Anyone else done that recently enough that the relevant brain cells are still warm? On a related note, I have an Asus RT-N66U which has failover capability to a USB 3G cell modem, but cell coverage here is for crap, which is why I have a microcell from AT&T, but it uses... wait for it... the cable broadband. Once I get dialup working via unRAID, I might can even port it to the RT-N66U. Plus none of the cell carriers have a workable data plan for a warm standby device. Virgin used to have a good prepaid data-only plan that you could activate and prepay, and it would incur no charges until you actually used it so it could sit idle for months, and then when you used it, it would be ready to go. DSL would be a possibility too, but none of the naked DSL providers have a decent plan either.
July 19, 201213 yr Hmmm...I would not want to do that with unraid....rather use a dedicated linux based FW/router...maybe IPCOP or similar in an ESXi build? On the other hand...the ASUS with the USB-3G modem is also only sending serial commands to connect. ...what about using a USB modem or USB/serial converter (for the landline modem) and dd-wrt on the router. This should allow you to customize the dial-strings. Edit: ...thinking more of it, this is not easy to do.... What is/will be the type of your dialup connection? ISDN...what hardware? Setting up the PPP-router is not that hard...as said, use IPCOP or fli4l What I find harder to do is that you will need to swap routes in your network once the primary-WAN is down. ...again, I've seen things done with dd-wrt and dual-WAN configs...needs some scripting...the primary router needs to forward all traffic to the secondary router instead to the WAN if.
July 19, 201213 yr Author I have no qualms about doing it with unRAID, I've managed many forward-facing Linux boxes. I prefer to have just one "always-on" box, and unRAID is it, running many apps 24x7. DD-WRT would not cut it. Trying different firmware, I was able to get the shibby build of TomatoUSB to work with a pl2303 USB to RS232 bridge and talk to a dialup modem, so that is also on the table. WAN swapping is the tricky part. I have a script that will monitor the cable modem through the switch with a static route. With that in cron, I can do a failover, once I figure out how to do the swap.
July 19, 201213 yr I am still thinking that doing this inside a single spot, like your router would be best Maybe DD-WRT is not cutting into it, but scanning the wiki, I found... ...Option 3: install a serial port on your router...some models may already have it...more or less, see: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/WRT54GL_MAX232_Serial ...and a dual WAN scenario with failover on the router is also not impossible, see: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Dual_WAN_with_failover
July 20, 201213 yr I am still thinking that doing this inside a single spot, like your router would be best Maybe DD-WRT is not cutting into it, but scanning the wiki, I found... ...Option 3: install a serial port on your router...some models may already have it...more or less, see: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/WRT54GL_MAX232_Serial ...and a dual WAN scenario with failover on the router is also not impossible, see: http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Dual_WAN_with_failover I have a fairly old wireless router that had exactly that feature of a built in serial port. I'm sure you can find a more current one with the same capability. (It was a D-Link 713p)
July 21, 201213 yr Author Geez, have we turned into Reddit here My desire to put it on unRAID is not whimsical... it is intentional and practical. I need it on unRAID specifically because I need my security apps that are running in a VM on unRAID to have 7x24 Internet access, and if it has to failover to dialup, I want that dialup dedicated to the security apps and not shared with whatever other stuff may be trying to go through the regular router. I also don't want to have to depend on other secondary UPSes for all the switches between unRAID and the router. I can rely on the single large UPS with multiple batteries that runs unRAID, since that UPS runs over 24 hours longer than the others. There is no benefit to beefing up the UPS on the router since if power is out, the cable dies shortly thereafter. In any event, I got it working using a chat script and ppd rather than wvdial. FWIW, DD-WRT is broken w/r/t serial modems on the USB port with a standard pl2303 bridge. However Shibby's build (with 64K NVRAM code) of TomatoUSB on the same router works fine. Finally, since I have 50Mb up and 10 down, a lot of older routers won't handle that data rate, which is why I went to the RT-N66U.
July 23, 201213 yr Geez, have we turned into Reddit here My desire to put it on unRAID is not whimsical... it is intentional and practical. I need it on unRAID specifically because I need my security apps that are running in a VM on unRAID to have 7x24 Internet access, and if it has to failover to dialup, I want that dialup dedicated to the security apps and not shared with whatever other stuff may be trying to go through the regular router. understood. Your solution is slightly different than I was envisioning from your original request. i thought you might try attaching the serial port of the unRAID server to the dial-up-modem. Glad you got it working. Joe L.
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