Hi, can anyone share best working HTTP health check examples with match string set?
We running into multiple outages caused by ATT U-verse/DSL WAN links as a secondary WAN or ISP.
In the event, if service is down for whatever reasons (non-pay, signal lost or others)
Majority of ATT modems wallgarden your connection and lend you to the page to resolve signal lost or make a payment. While this is highjack DNS and DNS health check shows that link as healthy and leave it on.
And depending on the WAN use scenario users ether complain that the Internet is slow, some site not connecting
all the way up to connectivity loss if Primary ISP has an outage while we didn’t realize that out ATT WAN link was down as well.
I’ve tried a few different settings and sites but my experience is very contradicting.
Do you think you can own a web server and use the web server as the health check target? If so, the matching string will be one of the static key word from the web page.
You can use something like Google, Amazon, or eBay as well. You’ll just want to make sure if you use the Match String option that the page you’re using has that matching text. Pages like gmail.com have the “Sign In” text at the top of the page, I believe this has been on the page since Google introduced Gmail as a service.
If you have a server setup you can know for sure that the Matching String text will always be present as long as you have the server up and running.
Hope this helps someone. Most websites use HTTPS and that won’t work for HTTP health check. These sites seem like they will be reliable and stable as they are designed specifically to provide an HTTP connection.
I had submitted a feature request for Peplink a while ago to also enable HTTPS health checks (since most websites are HTTPS no longer HTTP). For HTTP I use yahoo.com and apache.org.
Would it be possible for Peplink to create a page in InControl or SpeedFusion Cloud that users could leverage as an HTTP health check? Maybe the health check in the router could pass the “search string” as a query string parameter and as long as the web server returned that string back in the body – it would be a success. If the search string isn’t found in the response – you can assume that you have been walled by the ISP.
It is not crazy difficult to do but if you want to use someone else website, I’d advise to find some very old websites that didnt change since the early 2000’s, very low risk it’ll start changing now and it is probably very light to load.
Why are we trying to find old websites that still use http? Peplink support, please explain why we can’t monitor https site yet? Or just remove the feature since it goes again modern security protocols and is practically useless.
Like @Venn I also run my own from different datacenters and have found the http healthcheck (with matching string verification) to be one of the most reliable methods for checking is an internet connection is online or not - so lets not remove it just yet.
I do agree with you though, others would benefit from being able to do a https lookup for sure. Lets ask @TK_Liew to log it as a feature / change request for us.
the only case we ran into HTTP check is needed is ATT UVerse modems in USA.
We ended up sunsetting UVERSE overall and move backup connections to 5G/LTE and forget about ATT Uverse like you want to forget a nightmare.
Besides in most of the areas where we used Uverse as a backup given us mare 6Mb/512k at best.
LTE is times and time faster and easier to manage all SIM cards in one place VS Uverse living in the past centure and not allow me to consolidate all Uverse accounts under 1 master account.
Too many problems and time consuming in the times when we want to do something more useful.
can you share more info on how such website should look like? I’ve tried multiple URLs suggested in this and other threads but the SIM cards I’m testing always pass the health check despite they are out of data. It seems that carriers don’t block the traffic but significantly throttle it thus the router can access the website and match the string.
How would you deal with such scenario Bandwidth Allowance Monitor?
Its tricky. The http health check will show whether traffic is routing or not but not at what throughput.
I would likely recommend bandwidth allowance monitor to cut off user traffic on cellular connections that reach their limits if possible. If not (because the cut off is not bandwidth based) use Dynamic weighted Bonding for general internet access so that if a link does get throttled DWB spots the limit (since latency and packetloss will likely rise) and doesn’t use it for active traffic until the throughput limit is lifted again.