About a week ago my Internet dropped right before we were going to go on vacation. This is how I got probably the worst possible bandaid to fix it.
I live in a building thats been around since the '60s. I have a cable Internet connection where the wire is older than my kids ages combined. Usually every few weeks, the Internet will have a few minutes of complete packet drops and then recover. This time, it was down for over 15 minutes. This happened right before we were about to leave on vacation so I did the bare minimum of "turning it on again" and reseating connections. No dice. This would have to wait until after I was back from the trip.
After getting back from vacation, I contacted our ISP who walked me through... resetting the connection and ... reseating wires, still didn't work so a tech was scheduled. In the meantime, the kids kept asking for the Internet to be setup so I fired up the hotspot we used on trips. This works fine, but I really didn't want to reconfigure every single "smart" device just for a couple days, so I did what any normal person would do... the worst setup with the least number of wires run.
Here's how the apartment is connected to the Internet.
- Disable the Wi-Fi on the hotspot.
- Connect the hotspot to the mac mini sitting in the corner.
- Run a Powerline Ethernet connector from the mac mini to the nearest outlet.
- Connect the other Powerline Ethernet adapter from the wall to the WAN port of the router.
- Enable connection sharing in macOS from the hotspot to the Ethernet connection.
- Restart the router.
Everything is back. No need to change any device settings.
I'm so sorry (for the powerline Ethernet adapter part).
- Disable the Wi-Fi on the hotspot
- Connect the hotspot to the new travel router I got (https://www.gl-inet.com/products/gl-mt300n-v2/)
- Connect the WAN from the cable modem to the WAN port of the travel router.
- Enable tethering on the travel router.
- Connect the LAN port from the travel router to the WAN port on my home router.
Now I have a failover device.