The Modem Was the Problem
📆 2026-08-20 10:35
For the last three days, things have been a little... unreliable around here.
The culprit was the old modem.
Every 5-10 minutes or so, it would either reset itself completely, or decide that resetting was too much effort and simply lose internet connectivity for 30-60 seconds. Naturally, this made the home network about as reliable as a coin toss.
After enough frustration, 2 or 3 phone calls to my ISP, and my eyes getting tired of looking at the modem lights every now and then, I replaced the modem with a new one. It has a HUGE problem that the old one did not have: the Feng Shui problem - the new one is WHITE 🤮.
My almost entirely black homelab ( with a bit of grey from Tiny ) now has a bright white plastic box. I punished it by putting in on the bottom row of the rack with the slack from all the cables.
Even if it's white, the new modem has now been running for the last 20 hours without a single problem. Even better, Uptime Kuma has reported no errors during that time.
At this point, I'm cautiously optimistic that the problem is actually solved. Famous last words, I know.
Did anyone notice?
There is something funny about having an unreliable internet connection when your website is mostly aimed at the Small Web. The main site at sava.rocks is focused on things like Gemini, finger and Gopher, so I assume there aren't exactly thousands of people hammering the website every minute. Which means that, despite the service being intermittently unavailable for the last three days, I'm pretty sure almost nobody noticed.
Somewhere out there, there might be one person who tried to read a blog post, got a connection error, shrugged, and went back to doing something else.
If they even noticed that is.
Anyway, the modem is replaced, Uptime Kuma is happy, and the network has been behaving itself for 20 hours.
Long may the uptime continue.