Last year, I migrated my old AO-Hell homepage to my own dedicated server at home, in preparation for setting up a more elaborate website. After the past year of on-again, off-again troubleshooting, I finally have it set up to where the DSL connection and Apache server both work fine as soon as it finishes booting. My problem is, given our wonderful Florida weather (you can almost set your watch to when the thunderstorms pop up!) I occasionally lose my DSL connection, and the only way to restore it is to reboot.

What kind of connection monitor can I add to force an automatic reboot when this happens? Thanks in advance.

I almost forgot! This is an old Gig-n-a-third Thunderbird running Mandriva 2006.

well you can easily set up some sort of cron job to ping a remote site and reboot if it fails...

ping google.com -c4 > /dev/null 2>&1 || reboot

but i'd really really suggest that this isn't ever going to be fun. have you actually looked at how painfully cheap it is to rent *real* shared hosting? if you're keeping this server up just for the website, then your electricity bill for that box may well cost more than the equivalent hosting... and that would give you much much better uptime and infinitely better bandwidth and all sorts.

Actually, this box serves as my DSL gateway/printserver for the whole house, and since the static IP is a free extra with my plan, migrating my old AO-Hell page to my home server has several advantages, including more control, more storage space, and (hopefully!) a good learning experience. Currently my upstream speed is 384kbps, but since I'm not hosting any podcasts or other bandwidth-intensive content, I'm not really concerned about that right now. I have been toying with idea of podcasting, though, and if that happens, I definitely will be moving that offsite.

Thanks for the help.

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Instead of rebooting the machine, does a router/modem reboot fix the issue ?

If that does then you could write an expect script or use autoexpect to automate and write one for you. You could then write a similar cron which acid_kewpie mentioned earlier and get things up and running again.

There is a *vast* difference between some shitty AOL webpage package and usnig someone like dreamhost. I paid dreamhost $27 for the whole year and in exchange have 250GB of disk space, 3TB of bandwidth a month at a maximum on 30mbps... you still think you have an edge over that?

It's pretty bad when a user posts a question just to wind up getting FLAMED by, of all people, a MODERATOR!!!

i'm not flaming, sorry if it sounded that way, i gave you what appears to still be a totally valid answer to your question, it's just that i've personally learnt from experience that the reality of hosting from under the stairs is often more of a burden than a benefit.

Apology accepted. This is still a hobby and a learning experience for me, but if it ever takes off, I will definitely be looking for a webhost.