[Nottingham] How to remote diagnose network issues?

[Jason Irwin]

Have you ever found that when dealing with IT, you vanish down a rabbit
hole only to emerge back into the light and be incapable of seeing what is
in front of you face?

Seems there may be a number of factors making my life hell:
1) Dodgy power - there was a cut at around 1500 which tallies with when my
connection dropped.
2) Dodgy Internet - the Pi is betwixt two Spanish villages and that is as
problematic as you can imagine,
3) The VPN - although it's based on OpenVPN, either the way it's configured
or 2) above just makes it really brittle. I'm considering pulling that now
as, for reasons, it is no longer serving the intended function (and I've
half a mind to run-up my one on some of those Scaleway ARM doofers, for
reasons).

Given 1) and 2), is there a good approach to restablishing connections? I
can imagine writing arcane scripts along the lines of "IF 'ping google' is
ok THEN do stuff ELSE sleep for longer" but I can't help thinking this has
to be a solved problem. Probably 10 different ways... :-)

Hmm...would a 9V battery works as the UPS for a Pi?.... :-)

I've nw got systemd throwing a grump on reboot, at least that means it's
trying to run my test script. Progres!

Thanks for all the help on this - currently installing Ubuntu 15.04 (I had
the .iso on the drive) so i can muck about with systemd. Fingers crossed.

J.
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