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-- Big Mike, Site Administrator
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My auto-trader will run 24/5. I will be holding overnight positions. One of the things I need to monitor is my Internet connection. If it goes down, I need to get an alert on my phone. That means I need to ping my PC from my phone.
In testing the ping, I turned off wi-fi on my phone. Then, on my phone, I went to the following site and pinged my PC's IP address. As expected, the ping was successful.
Your PC's IP address... might be indistinguishable from your cable modem's address.
So in this case your tests would've been pinging the cable modem (or other ISP device) -- not the PC itself. If your PC is on a router it is essentially on a LAN and tough to directly ping it. You would need some other software on the PC to be able to isolate if a problem was related to the PC or the your internet service in general.
The router and modem are in the same box, so unplugging the router disconnects everything from the Internet. Given that, still don't understand how the ping was successful with the router/modem unplugged.
And I need to monitor all this from my phone, not my PC. Reason: If my PC crashes overnight, I need to know that, as well. So if my PC crashes, it would automatically lose Internet and no longer be ping-able,
However, I think I understand what you're saying about trying to ping an individual PC on a LAN.
Ah, the only thing that comes to mind is to double-check your public IP address by using one of the "whatsmyip" sites... but's that's probably how you found it originally ; ) It sounds like you might benefit from a true remote monitoring solution for the PC, that gives you alerts on other things in addition to whether is it connected, such as your memory/CPU usage, and so on. Maybe others have set this kind of software up and can recommend a good solution.
Yes, that's how I got my IP. It's a dynamic IP, so whenever I reset the router/modem (like in my test), my public IP changes. To make things even stranger, now that I have a new public IP, that site can still successfully ping the old IP. Weird.
Anyway, I appreciate your input, and thanks for trying to help!
I would recommend you look at a VPS first of all, instead of trying to make this work.
I've spent thousands of dollars on infrastructure to ensure I have no single point of failure in my home, because my house is my business, and time is money.
For me:
Power -> I have a whole-house generator that can power my entire home, all AC's, everything - running on propane. I also have many, many UPS's around the house for the 6 or 7 seconds it takes for the generator to kick in. The UPS's are connected to all my various access points, networking equipment, servers, workstations, etc.
Wifi -> I use Ubiquiti. I have seven Access Points, and each is linked physically via ethernet, but also supports Wifi mesh failure. Mission critical items such as servers and workstations have physical connections via ethernet.
Internet -> I have multiple Gigabit fiber optic uplinks via different ISP's that use different backbones. On top of that, I have 4G LTE backup in the event both fiber's are down. Everything is handled by my own pfsense router, which handles the automatic load-balancing and failover/failback. It's then fed into my Ubiquiti USG before reaching out to the network.
Platform -> After years of running everything out there, I ended up writing my own.
Computer -> I have several. Too many. But I also have many co-located servers at multiple datacenters, for mission critical applications. There are many cloud service companies out there where you can deploy your own private cloud. Or you can use someone else who already did that, and run on top of their cloud.
I have 20+ years of professional networking experience, 20+ years trading experience. At some point, all this shit becomes a full-time job (hobby in my case) and you spend less and less time trading.
My suggestion, forego all of this and just get a VPS. One of NexusFi's very own, @sam028, owns Speedy Trading Servers and could be of some help perhaps.
Just one more comment about using a "ping aggregation" type of site to ping a home IP address, it's way overkill and you don't know really what it is actually doing -- and there is no way to find out. So, try your own ping command from a command-line on any other computer connected to a different IP. It's just about the most basic network command available on any OS.
I had my brother in California use the CMD prompt to ping my public IP. Pretty much got the same results.
His ping to my public IP was successful.
Then I disconnected my PC from the Internet... and his ping to my PC was still successful.
Then I unplugged the router/modem... and his ping to my PC was still successful. Not sure what's going on with all that, but it probably has to do with the IP being dynamic. I may look into a static IP at some point, but that's a project for another day.
Anyway, what Mike recommended is really more than what I need because what I'm doing is very simple.
So I found and installed a free Windows utility on my PC. I have it set to ping Google every 30 seconds. If it doesn't get a response from Google for 120 seconds, it plays a WAV file of my choosing. I created a WAV file with a very loud, irritating, repetitive beep that goes on for five minutes. If that doesn't wake me up, nothing will.
The last thing I need: I'm looking for an Android app that can remotely monitor my PC and play a WAV file as an alarm if it loses contact with my PC. We'll see how that goes.