Re: Query : seeking a (low cost & secure) turnkey plug-and-play appliance to report network outages

[Jon Lewis <jlewis () lewis org>]

On Thu, 17 Nov 2011, A. Chase Turner wrote:

> I am seeking a $100 turnkey micro hardware appliance to plug into a LAN hub (behind a consumer-level cable modem) whose 
> only purpose in life is to send heartbeat (and simple quality of service metrics) to a pre-configured central 
> aggregation service on the WAN.

It sounds like all you need is a preconfigured device that can boot up, be 
plugged into their LAN, do DHCP, and then talk to a "remote monitoring 
station" at configured intervals.  If you're willing to do a bit of work 
pre-deployment, you could probably pick out an inexpensive DD-WRT/OpenWRT 
compatible device (i.e. WRT54GL, or maybe a more modern variant with more 
RAM/Flash) and with a tiny bit of scripting, you're done.

Appneta looks even more appropriate, but I couldn't find anything about 
pricing on them.  The WRT54GL is definitely sub $100.  The trouble with 
this sort of thing is that from the docs, it seems alot of the hardware 
kind of sort of works mostly, and the manufacturers like to make serious 
enough changes with product revisions, such that you can't be sure a 
device will work based solely on the model number...you need to know what 
revision it is.

----------------------------------------------------------------------
 Jon Lewis, MCP :)           |  I route
 Senior Network Engineer     |  therefore you are
 Atlantic Net                |
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