I am quite unhappy to admit it but when it comes to reliability, my LTE router that I use for backup connectivity for my home cloud comes nowhere close to my VDSL router. Every week or so after the daily power reset the router fails to connect to the network without any apparent reason. Sometimes it connects but the user plane is broken. Packets are still going out but my SSH tunnels do not come up while the authentication log on the other side shows strange error messages. The only way to get things back on track is to reboot the LTE router or to power cycle it. Rebooting the router can only be done from inside the network so when I'm traveling and the network needs to fall back to the backup link, there's nothing I can do should that fail.
When I recently stumbled over the 'EnerGenie EG-PM2' power strip that has switchable power sockets via a built in USB interface I knew the time had come to do something about this. At around 30 euros it's quite affordable as well and the software required on the Raspberry Pi, Ubuntu or Debian side are open source and already part of the software repository. A simple 'sudo apt-get install sispmctl' executed in a shell and the setup is up and running without further configuration. Individual power sockets are switched off and on via the following shell commands:
sudo sispmctl -f 3 #switches power socket 3 off
sudo sispmctl -o 3 #switches power socket 3 on
It couldn't be easier and I had the basic setup up and running in 2 Minutes. In a next step I wrote a short Python script that checks if Internet connectivity is available via the backup link and if not, power cycles the LTE router. I noticed that there's a Python wrapper for 'sispmctl' but it's also possible to just execute a command in a shell from Python as follows:
import subprocess
result_on = subprocess.call ("sudo sispmctl -o 4", shell=True)
Perhaps not as elegant as using the wrapper but it works and the result variable can be checked for problems such as the USB link to the power strip being broken.