Keep That Internet Connection Up

Posted May 30, 2003

Keep That Internet Connection Up By Corey Haines

I own a two family house, living in one of the units while renting out the other. I have a cable modem as an Internet connection, but unfortunately, my modem is not so stable. When the modem freezes up, I have to physically unplug it, wait 30 seconds, then plug it back to reboot.

In order to share the connection with my tenants, I set up a wireless network in my house and bought a wireless card for their computer downstairs. Since the modem is upstairs in my apartment, if it goes down, they have no way to physically reboot it. Being a programmer by trade, my first inclination was to write a small program to monitor the connection. If it goes down, my program would need to turn off the modem, wait 30 seconds, then turn it back on. I was in a bit of a quandary about how to get my computer to actually cut power to the modem.

Luckily, I remember that I had bought an X10 Firecracker Kit, which included the Firecracker computer interface and a transceiver module. I plugged the Firecracker into my computer's serial port, plugged the modem into the transceiver module, and, with some help from my friend Brian, I connected my program up to send on/off commands to the Firecracker computer interface.

Now, when the program senses that the Internet connection is down, it sends an "off" command to the transceiver, waits 30 seconds, then sends an "on" command. So far, it works great and the connection stays up!

Thanks X10,
Corey Haines

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