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Jonathan Duane

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Notify me when PC isnt online

Hi Guys, i have a mini pc on 16 different locations. Each PC connects to a web address video.domain.xx/location 90% of locations are fine but i have one or two pcs that have poor wifi connection and they will lose connection to web address they are all using Firefox

The locations are in gyms and displaying on TV screens so its not ideal to have it displaying a timeout message,

Is there anything i can do get it to reconnect when decent wifi is restored? or even to notify if pc isnt connected to its associated website
Avatar of Dr. Klahn
Dr. Klahn

Possibly try better WiFi adapters or larger antennas on the systems first and see if the connectivity issue can be resolved that way.  If so, that beats rolling your own software to address the problem.
Is it possible to cache the web page and display locally so that if you lose connection, it'll still display something instead of a "lost connection" message? That way, people may not immediately notice when it isn't updating or updated are lagging.
There are many services that will send you an email or text if the machine loses internet connection.  One such service I used to use:
https://www.r-u-on.com/more/pricing

Better improve connection to 100% instead of trying to have things coming after disconnection.

Try cables still instead, otherwise a Homeplug solution, or replace WiFi equipment (both the AP/router, AND client) to the newest most stable solutions.

there are plenty of services that will ping your site for you every x amount of seconds and alert you when your site is down. since this is internal you could just as easily create your own script that pings your internal IPs and notifies you when that IP is no longer pinging does that make sense?

To your question. The best way would be to connect these mini PCs via Ethernet cable, add one more access point or just move the current AP closer. If this is not a way for you, you can use third-party monitoring solution or script, that will notify you if your device is disconnected.

Anyway, try to switch your wireless adapter from 2,4GHz to 5GHz and see if it improves the WiFi. It sometimes helps.
You probably periodicaly refresh a web page.

Setup a preferably local simple page that refreshes an iframe. That way, when the connection is lost, the parent page still works and the feed will resumed naturally as soon as the connection is back.

Even better, load the iframe data through an ajax call so the parent page can handle errors and preserve existing content when the connection is lost.

Alternatives include using a ff extension to reload the page which is quite trivial to setup. But downtimes won t be handled or reported.

It is also relatively easy to trace calls and report failures whenever the connection works again.

this is a must have. Having an always working connection is merely a bonus : first account for possible errors, then make sure they are as seldom as possible.
For me, the priority would be to improve WiFi signal. I would focus on that instead of using workarounds.

You can use an external WiFi antenna if there is a barrier between the PC and the AP.
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i strongly disagree :

having automated recovery in case of failure is not a workaround : it is the basics of building something robust. internet does fail from time to time for reasons you have no control over such as a fire or flood in the ISP's datacenter, a tree falling on one of his cables 50 miles away from your location, a hurricane in a different state... when you deal with a huge number of locations, you simply cannot afford manual intervention everytime such an issue arises.

but then a robust redundant internet connection won't harm. it's mostly a matter of cost efficiency which highly depends on the requirements
I get your point here. However, we are discussing just two PCs which is not a robust thing. The author described it as "a poor wifi connection" so you can expect these fails. The automated recovery solution should support something that works. Not to be a solution for something often failing. Just my point of view.

Anyway, you have two options here. Improve the WiFi connection or let the auto-recovery solution do the trick...
Hmm... the author states 16 locations and we can assume more to come... my vote goes for both. Given what i can guess a single short downtime would break the whole thing until there is some manual intervention. From what i gather, this could happen every hour without it being much of a problem as long as it is shortly recovered
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