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I Let Claude Build My Home Network: Two ISPs Bonded, $312/Year Saved
- jclarkcom 10mo agoBonding two ISPs was previously too complex for most home use until agentic AI. Claude can automate the entire WireGuard/OpenWRT/VPN setup, testing, and security hardening via SSH as an afternoon project. Total cost: $305 over 3 years vs $1,241 for commercial solutions. Downgrade your current ISP and add a second cheap one to get faster more reliable internet at home.
- nickphx 10mo agoyeaaaaaah .. something the llm didn't explain is how asymmetric bandwidth or latency between the connections will degrade performance... or how many services like streaming, banking, gaming will restrict, block, or otherwise treat the connection differently because the traffic now exits via a datacenter or VPN IP/ASN..
- jfernandezr 10mo agoAlso the DigitalOcean deoplet includes 500GB per month, which for me is absolutely limited. Last month I consumed about 10TB.
- jclarkcom 10mo agoThat's a very good point. I included a "Cost Comparison by Bandwidth Usage" section that shows the cost for Digital Ocean compared to a commercial bonded solution. At 10TB the monthly DO cost goes up to $84/month which is significant, but if you compare that with a commercial solution that gives you a bonded connection (Speedify) they would charge $120/m for 10TB. If you used Oracle cloud, I think 10TB is still in their free tier so you'd be looking at ~$15/month.
- jclarkcom 10mo ago> or how many services like streaming, banking, gaming will restrict, block, or otherwise treat the connection differently because the traffic now exits via a datacenter or VPN IP/ASN. I did run into this and claude implemented a work-around (see step 8) to route some traffic through the normal exit IP for those special use cases. So far I've only run into this problem with 3 services (Ring, Blink, and Paychex). Surprisingly none of the streaming services seem to care (Netflix, Amazon, Apple TV).
- sema4hacker 10mo agoTo save money, I would have just switched to ATT fiber like you did, drop Xfinity completely, and try that for awhile. It's worked for me for years, and my only downtime has been a few times during winter storms when the power goes out completely.
- jclarkcom 10mo agonice. I wish fiber was available for me. I only had access to AT&T's copper service (DSL) but they do 2-pair bonding so speed is not far from Xfinity.
- dfajgljsldkjag 10mo agoYour AI slop said you have fiber, so maybe you should try to actually read it instead of having us catch your lies. > 1. Downgraded Xfinity from $90/mo to a basic $50/mo plan (still usable speeds, just lower tier) > 2. Added AT&T Fiber as a second line at $55/mo (different infrastructure = different failure modes) > 3. Bonded both connections using WireGuard VPN and OpenWRT routing Edit: Another lie detected: ATT isn't accepting new customers on DSL, and is in fact yanking service for existing customers in many areas. So there's zero chance that OP signed up for ATT copper internet within the last year or so. https://www.att.com/internet/dsl/ https://www.att.com/internet/dsl/
- jclarkcom 10mo agoThanks for your response, I'm acknowledging it and taking to heart.
- nickphx 10mo agooh boy, how amazing... an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years..
- ctoth 10mo agoAnd Dropbox is an afternoon project for any Linux user, right? Right?
- nickphx 10mo agoIf you believe the two are similar in complexity and effort, you have much to learn.
- ctoth 10mo agoI believe your comment pattern matches to the classic comment 9224, was the point I was making. Yes, this might be easy for you. > an llm managed to generate some iptables rules and sysctl settings that have been well documented for years.. > you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. But the whole point of the blog post is that a person who didn't know how to do it did the thing. If the thing is the goal, they succeeded. They now have a thing they didn't have before, after not knowing how to do that thing. A new capability was unlocked by the LLM. Please generalize this.
- mattbee 10mo agoAnd a really dreary blog describing something simple at great length :/
- shermantanktop 10mo agoIf you are starting from relative ignorance about the topic, then yes, it is amazing. But it does mean that the user can build a solution that they don’t understand well enough to maintain.
- damieng 10mo agoI also went with an Xfinity cable and Frontier fibre combo in about 2018 I think. I just bought a Synology RT2600 router at the time and plugged each provider in then set it to load balanced. Reliability and speeds were great. Possibly not as optimised as this perf wise but a lot easier to setup.
- EgregiousCube 10mo agoAI clearly wrote the blog post too - it's a neat project but the "ai style of writing" really doesn't work well for a long form article. It's like a collection of listicles. I think it'd be a better presentation to use more prose and fewer bullet points - I'm more interested in the human experience than the machine experience here!
- q3k 10mo agoIt's a lot of words that basically say nothing. There's no substance there - eg. no info on how the setup works (how, if at all, do they integrate MPTCP?). Just endless bullet points repeating themselves.
- EgregiousCube 10mo agoAbsolutely. The reason I clicked in the first place was to see if there was an elegant MPTCP implementation.
- phillipseamore 10mo agoLooks like this proposed a solution that costs about the same as the mentioned Speedify (more expensive at the moment because of blackfriday deals) but lacks all the features and is more likely to break.
- satertek 10mo agoMy first concern would be using a digital ocean droplet as a VPN. Last time I tried that, datacenter IP ranges often made things slower or unusable.
- woleium 10mo agothis. the cameras are not the only thing that won’t work you could use an azure VDI machine as a cloud endpoint, i believe those ips are flagged correctly. It’s not this cheap though.
- kemotep 10mo agoIt would be cool if the output that that the LLM made (commands it ran to harden, the iptables, MPTCP config, etc.) was included in the post. It seems incredulous that this didn’t take dozens of back and forth prompts and fixes. It was able to one-shot deploying a digital ocean droplet and configure wireguard?
- jclarkcom 10mo agoHere are some of the commands it used (censored & auto-generated) with a few specific examples at the end: https://jonathanclark.com/posts/bonded-internet-connection-commands.md https://jonathanclark.com/posts/bonded-internet-connection-c... > It was able to one-shot deploying a digital ocean droplet and configure wireguard? Yes, that part was pretty easy - but the whole thing wasn't one shot. The parts I struggled with were: - getting automated SSH installed on the $130 router, once you have that the LLM can drive things - during security hardening, I got fully locked out and had to recreate a new VM. But it was able to automatically recreate everything in a few minutes.
- kemotep 10mo agoThanks for sharing. Just looking over this it seems to spend some time creating ufw rules and then deletes them all and disables ufw. Is that accurate or is this just the output and you had to copy and paste in? I am assuming all the missing steps is just the information you censored.
- kundi 10mo agoYou completely neglected the egress cost for DO, and also the time / maintenance needed, which makes this a poorly engineered fantasy
- jclarkcom 10mo agoHarsh, but a good point on egress cost that I overlooked, I'm adding a section on this - if you use Oracle cloud it looks like you get 10TB included at no additional cost where DO would be around $84 at the same bandwidth levels