Last Christmas was kind of uneventful time of the year for me. I went to my parents’ place for the holidays and left my sad server alone in my apartment. Everything was unicorns and rainbows until one day I couldn’t reach the server from outside – bad.

I called my immediate neighbours to ask them to check if someone has broken into my apartment (had been living there for less than a month then and it is not in the best part of town) or if the electricity went out. Both suspicions – false, according to my neighbours – kind of better.

Still the server was inaccessible and I had to access it, to finish a project of mine. So what did I do? Actually what I did was get angry and swear a fair amount and stand defeated, because I didn’t want to drive to the apartment (150km away), I needed the files, but not that much. My dad couldn’t stand my mumbling and told me that I either stop mumbling or we are going to the apartment.

Long story short – my router was set up to reboot every morning, because the WiFi was hanging a lot. The morning of the accident, the router rebooted, but couldn’t start up and stayed dead. I had no way to reboot it remotely and if it didn’t start, the cron job couldn’t reboot it. So yeah… not really thought through.

This year I was going to be away for the holidays again, so there was no way I would let that happen again.

The basic idea that I had in mind is to have a spare Raspberry Pi act as a 3G modem and access it when I need something on the server at home.