After being home for weeks, I went away for business, the 1st night away there was a brief powercut and the firewall (on a UPS) seemed to get stuck.
So, that’s no DNS, DHCP, or connectivity between wifi and LAN… All due to (admittedly aging) hardware issue.
Since then my entire home system has had issues whilst it all settles down.
It made me think about getting some redundancy into the system to handle a single failure.
So,.can you give me any insights into High Availability like CARP (for pfSense), VM failover (on Incus?), mesh wifi, Home Assistant, etc?
Of course there are going to be single points, like ISP line, etc, but seems like something to test out.
I have a LTE Backhaul,but admittedly if the firewall itself craps out I would also be offline - but I can at least reboot it via a plain old GSM power plug. That thing does not directly reboot the firewall,though, but brings up a old raspberry (usb boot,I don’t trust sdcards) which then checks if outside connectivity is still available (so if the GSM power plug gets compromised it’s not an issue) and if not tries a shutdown or,if that is unsucessful, a powercut of the firewall. If that also doesn’t work it triggers a dry contact in the GSM plug which leads to the plug sending out a SMS so I know I am fucked and need to get someone with a key to the rack.
Wow.
Ok, that sounds like that has evolved over some time!
My company is a part of critical infrastructure and we provide consulting in disasters (e.g. how to get a hospital back up and running). So we fall under European legislation to have certain precautions. And as I colocate in my companys rack…it’s easier. As the rack is in a room I rent to my company. (We are small and I am the founder,that makes it easier)
But yeah, we put a bit of thought in it. Waiting for Iris2 finally materialise so I can get rid of LTE finally.