Alert, Warning of Internet Disconnect?

Question

Alert, Warning of Internet Disconnect?

Greetings,

I am inquiring if anyone is aware of utility which can monitor a mac's internet connection for viability and provide some form of warning (beeping, email, notification) if it is determined an internet disconnect has occurred.

I have a personal weather station at my home which uploads to the Wunderground site. While it is "not the end of the world" if Wunderground doesn't get my data, I take my part in the personal weather station community semi-seriously. I am plagued with Internet dropouts 3 to 4 times a week. I don't really know if it is somethings to do with my hardware setup or the provider (Cox communications). Often I catch the "drops" within a few hours and usually a restart of my cable modem and Airport base station will reestablish the connection. Sometimes, if the "drop" has been prolonged, I will get a notification via email from Wunderground.

I just wan't be readily warned if the "little green Internet light" in Airport Utility goes out. I suppose if Airport Utility was Applescriptable it might be possible to take that route. It seems this is an issue that enough people might be concerned about that someone may have developed some software which could do this.

Thanks

David

iMac with Retina 5K display, OS X El Capitan (10.11.2), Mac Mini, TimeCapsule Base Station

Posted on Dec 27, 2015 10:22 AM

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Answer 1

Camelot

Level 9

54,339 points

Dec 28, 2015 12:15 AM in response to David Goucher

You likely can't do this alone.

If your internet connection has gone down then you don't have a mechanism to send an email (unless you're running your own email server on your local network).

There are a number of external services, though, that will periodically ping your IP address from the outside and send you an alert if the connection fails.

If you're only concerned with checking from inside your network then there are a number of utility programs that can monitor your network and sound an alarm. You could even write an AppleScript to do the job - there are a number of examples in the AppleScript forum here since the question has come up more than once before.

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