Back in 2004 I found that my ISP had outages where we would not have an Internet connection for a while. That was… a lifetime ago. Well, 16 years ago, anyway. You can see the mention of it in my Connection Report post. I guess I started with checking every 30 minutes, but I eventually changed that to every 15 minutes. As you can see above, I eventually changed it to every 5 minutes because in the last 6 months I’ve seen that we sometimes have very short outages…
And then I thought, why the heck am I looking at connections when I really want to look at “no connections”, so I rewrote the Perl script that’s been running via cron for 16 years to check for no connection instead.
So now I check every minute for an outage, and if there is one, we log it. Now, I know there are more efficient ways to do this, and there’s probably a better way to run this, and there’s probably an open source monitoring solution that will do 100 times what this little script does, but… I don’t care.
Sometimes I care more about hacking together a solution for myself, and messing around with it every now and then, and actually, you know… writing code for the sake of writing code.