I take pride in hosting my blog on a 13-year old ThinkPad acting as a home server, but sometimes it’s kind of a pain. It’s only fair that I cover the downsides of this setup in contrast to all the positives.

Yesterday, I happened to notice that a connection to a backup endpoint was gone. Okay, happens sometimes. Then I went into the router and noticed that hey, that’s odd, there’s no WAN6 connection showing up. All gone. Just as if I had gone back to a crappy ISP that only provides IPv4!

Restarting the interface did not work, but a full router restart worked.

Since the IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix are all dynamic, that meant that my DNS entries had just gone stale. I do have a custom DNS auto-updater script for my DNS provider, but DNS propagation takes time. Luckily not a lot of time, my uptime checker only reported downtime of 5-15 minutes, depending on the domain.

Here’s what it looked like on OpenWRT.

The IPv4 only experience.
The IPv4 only experience.
Interface was still there, just not in a happy state.
Interface was still there, just not in a happy state.
Interface down, in pending state.
Interface down, in pending state.

Impact to my blog? Not really noticeable, since IPv4 kept trucking along. Perhaps a few IPv6-only readers may have noticed this.1

I can always move to a cheap VPS or the cloud at a moments’ notice, but where’s the fun in that? I can produce AWS levels of uptime at home, thankyouverymuch!

I think I’ll now need to figure out some safeguards, even if it means scheduling a weekly router reboot if the WAN6 interface is not up for X amount of time.

That, and better monitoring.

  1. if you are that person, say hi! ↩︎