A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
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First off. If Internet goes down I have a http captive portal that do some diagnos, showing where the problem is. Link on network interface, gateway reachable, dns working and dhcp lease. Second, now when it is down, show the timestamp when it went down. Third, phone number to the ISP and city fiber network owner.
Forth. Watch my local RSS feed and email folder. Also have something to watch from Youtube or Twitch game downloaded locally.
Can I get more details on this captive portal? How does it diagnose network issues or what software are you using for the captive portal?
I use very simple software for this. My firewall can use route monitoring and failover and use policy based routing. I just send all traffic to another machine with the diagnosis part. It does ping through the firewall and fetch some info from the firewall. The page itself is not pretty but say what is wrong. Enough for parents to read what error. I also send DNS traffic to a special DNS server that responds with the same static ip address - enough for the browser to continue with a HTTP GET that the firewall will send forward to my landing page. It is sad that I don't have any more problems since I changed ISP.
Had a scenario when the page said gateway reachable but nothing more. ISP issue. DHCP lease slowly ran out. There were a fiber cut between our town and the next. Not much I could do about it. Just configured the IP static and could reach some friends through IRC in the same city so we could talk about it.
The webpage itself was written in php that read icmp logs and showed the relevants logs of up and down. Very simple.
I've been in IT all my life, starting in the mid 80's. Got an extensive home lab and host pretty much everything you tend to use as SAAS these days at home too. Home mail, cloud, web based office suite, etc.
But for the "what if your ISP goes down", well, then I switch to my neighbors ISP XD.
There's dozens of ISPs of various sizes where I live and there's neighbors representing 8 of these ISPs. I have access to all their networks (most of them gave access).
So if my ISP goes down, I switch to another one.
That said, I haven't had an outage longer than 30 minutes in 5 years and the average time between shorter outages (quick resets to minutes long) happen 1ce a year or so.
There are some announced outages, usually once per quarter, for network upgrades and system maintenance. But generally, my ISP has a 99,99% uptime.
We keep vital info cached locally to our devices, using Syncthing for credentials and files (KeePass databases, tech notes, documents, etc.), and a Radicale instance for syncing calendaring and contacts to our Android phones using Etar and DAVx⁵. So, no real need for any connectivity when away from the home.
I have starlink has backup for my DSL. Actually had a 5 day outage over eastern. Was a matter of 5 minutes to book a month of service and I was back online.