Hi all,

I had a new idea for a homelab project, but I’m having trouble coming up with the best course of action/ technologies to use to make it happen.

I want to be able to tell when the power goes out at a building that my dad owns. When he had a telephone service there he could call the phone to see if the power was out, but the phone line is long gone. We just had internet installed in the building and I had the idea of using that to probe if the power was on remotely.

My idea is to simply put a raspberry pi on the building network and have it update a duckdns reservation with the router’s wan ip, then I can run a script on my home network that pings the remote router every few minutes and updates a webpage that I’ll host with the status, etc., etc.

Does this idea sound like it would work, or is there a better way to do this? I’m trying to keep it as simple as possible.

Thanks for any help, love this community!

  • spanky_rocketsOPBEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Simple solution would be a RPI or router that connects back to your home with wireguard/openvpn so you have a device that you can ping

    Thanks for your reply, this was my initial idea but then I thought it’d be a lot less moving parts to ping the router wan itself. However I realize if the router loses power that i.p could very well get served to someone else and then I’d just be pinging them instead lol.

    Probably will end up doing this. In this case I would ping the wireguard i.p. of the device from another wireguard enabled device, correct?

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    These probes allow tunneling backwards (when enabled) and also do some other local device monitoring. All running on RPI type devices with local wan or 4g

    Not sure what you mean exactly by tunneling backwards, could you elaborate?

    Thanks again!