Re: Out of band monitoring of equipment

[Scott Gifford <sgifford () tir com>]

John Leong <johnleong () research bell-labs com> writes:

> Curious if any operator uses, or have interest in using, out of band
> network (e.g. modem, wireless etc.) for remote equipment (routers,
> switches, HVAC etc.) monitoring over and above doing it in band on the
> Internet.

In past jobs, we have done this for both administration and some
monitoring.

For administration, we just used an old Annex3 terminal server as a
serial connection mux.  We plugged up to 64 serial cables into the
consoles of various devices, and connected a modem to one of
those serial cables.  That worked really well.

For monitoring, a team that I worked with had a machine that monitored
the network and had a connection to a phone line to issue pages when
things broke.

I think these are both fairly common setups.

Hope this helps,

------ScottG.