Power is the last resort
Vigil tries a DHCP renewal first, which fixes a large share of stuck-lease cases with no outage at all.
OPNsense · modem watchdog
A dead man’s switch for your uplink.
Vigil watches your firewall’s WAN connection and power-cycles the modem when the ISP stops handing out a DHCP lease. Built for sites nobody is physically at.
- DHCP renewal tried before any power is cut
- Knows a hung modem from an ISP outage
- Every failure path restores power
Why it exists
For the sites nobody is watching.
A hung modem at a warehouse, a tower site, or a branch office means a truck roll. Vigil means somebody does not have to drive there.
Hung modem, or ISP outage?
If the WAN gateway still answers, the fault is upstream and a power cycle cannot help — so Vigil does not cycle.
A rolling 24-hour budget
A cap on how often it can switch means a fault it cannot fix never becomes a modem rebooting all night.
Every path restores power
On crash, on signal, on service stop, on package removal, on reboot — opening the relay always ends with power restored.
Two products
One is software, one is hardware. Sell both, licence one.
Vigil os-vigil
The OPNsense plugin that drives a USB relay. It checks in daily, pulls updates from the gated repository, and recovers your uplink without a truck roll.
- DHCP renewal first
- Distinguishes hung modem from outage
- 24-hour cycle budget
- USB from the firewall — no WiFi, no spare port
HHC-NET2D
A 2-channel Ethernet relay board with its own firmware and a ping watchdog. No firewall involved — and it can cycle the router as well as the modem.
- A/B firmware rollback
- Cycles router and modem
- Works with no firewall
The wiring is the point
Safe when the power is off.
The relay is wired COM + NC, so it must be actively energized to hold the modem off. Lose power to the firewall, unplug the USB cable, or crash the daemon — and the contact falls closed and the modem comes back. The safe state is the unpowered state.
See the full logicRelay wiring
COM + NC
- poweredrelay energized → modem held off
- power lostcontact closed → modem back
- crashdaemon dies → modem back
- unplugUSB pulled → modem back
Ship it
Put a watchdog on the site nobody is at.
Buy the NET2D outright, or get the Vigil USB relay with a 1-year licence. Renewing is a licence key and a card away.