Airplane777
join:2004-06-20
| One-man WISP & Vacation ?
This may be a dumb question, but I will be basically a one-man WISP. I know there are some others here that bascially are one-man WISP operations.
How do you guys take vacations, trips, and go away with the wife and kids? Seems that with being a one-man operation, you are pretty much tied down to your WISP.
I'll soon be in this boat myself. I may be able to have someone from my son's networking business help out, but they mainly are network integration people, working mainly with wired systems. Plus they are so busy with their work, they may not have time to help out if I go on vacation.
So, I'm wondering how your (who don't have partners) handle this.
I'm starting to think I need a partner to help out during vacations, sickness, and PTP site surveys, etc. I'm going to have to get my wife to help out on a PTP site survey. I'm thinking that I may not be able to do a real good job if I want to go on vacation or when I need an extra hand to help me when I'm working on top of a building doing site surveys.
Thanks for any info.
Thanks. |
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rawgerz
In Debt we trust
Premium
join:2004-10-03
Grove City, PA | remote admin is one way. |
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Diddy1
join:2003-07-19
Sidney, NE
| reply to Airplane777
I posted this same question about a year ago. I didn't get a good solution  Basically, I can't go on vacation until I get enough cash flow to hire someone, or if possible, a real financially sound partner?
Aaron |
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Bigpaddy_Irl
join:2005-12-12
Ireland
| reply to Airplane777
The only problem I really have is nodes stop responding after a long time. There is never a problem with a customers on their side. All my nodes have gsm rebooters, so every few hours or so I just log in with my laptop and 3g card into wiana, check the box's and if any of them are not responding just send the gsm rebooter a text to trip the power, and Bob's your uncle off they go again!! If God forbid anything did happen on the customers side, they just may wait for me to get back, but like I said, I have never had this problem as of yet. |
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polk5
join:2001-12-29
New Orleans, LA
| reply to Airplane777
Find someone in the computer business that would be willing to be your hands for a couple of days if needed. Your network should be setup to where you can remote in and troublshoot from the outside. Then call him if needed. I have someone that I can call if an emergency occurs. If you build a good network then it should not fall apart every week. If you build it with good gear and redundancy you probably will not have to make that call to him. |
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mrbueno
join:2002-08-03
US
1 edit | reply to Airplane777
Let 12 years of experience tell you, you can't. You really need to hire someone to do the most minimum stuff while you are gone. Even then you may want to get every remote device possible. When I was one man, I could get away for maybe three days like Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but that's about it.
I did just get back from two weeks of travel in Austria and the Czech Republic.
Recommendations:
IP-KVM - Something like this can be found around $500 »www.42u.com/raritan-kx101.htm These plug into your keyboard, video and mouse and allow control from bios on. Plug this into a cheap keyboard controlled regular KVM and you have a multi-unit KVM on the cheap
Remote Power Switch - »www.wti.com/ips8.htm What's the magic word when there is a problem and you don't know how to solve it? Reboot! I like my remote switches to have a serial port so I can dial-in and restart them. Which brings me to my next tool.
Serial terminal - For me, I happen to have portmaster 2's laying around. However, you can easily make a terminal server out of a linux machine »www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Rem···tty.html If you go the extra mile, you can setup a ppp session and access your network and all the network connected devices even if your backbone router goes down.
Treo 650 - With this phone and these tools I can pretty much fix most things without remote hands.
Extra stuff:
Overly-modded UPS - My UPSs are monsters. Actually they are just monsters to move. Marine batteries plugged into standard cheapy UPSs. They take forever to charge, but imagine how great it is to have 17+ hours of power for your AC powered computer systems like billing and phone servers then 24+ hours for your WRAP or over 12 volt APs. That's security that let's you enjoy your vacation.
System Virtualization - I recently decided to virtualize my RADIUS and proxy servers under VMWare since it's free now. There is a working image of each on a CD at my office. They can be added to any VMWare server on my network. Any spare windows machine can be easily installed with VMWare and the zipped virutal machines extracted. Viola! Working systems in seconds. Now that I think of it, I should probably make a script on the CD that unzips and runs the virtual machines so that anyone can easily get my network back online.
Outsourced Level 1 Tech Support - "My interwebs don't go! FIX IT!" "Have you tried resetting your equipment?" "What's thats means?" Yep, we all have days like this. Hire a Level 1 Tech Support company and provide them with the basic knowledge of how to resolve your most common problems. If they can't do it, they can tell the customer, "We'll get right on that. Someone will contact you in the next few hours." Then it's up to you big guy.
Things I haven't tried but would like to:
Pager-based power switch - These sound cool, but are they? Anyone with a clue on this?
Now this is how I do it. I run an ISP and a Gaming Center so I have to have other people on staff now so that helps out. That doesn't always work out either. See this thread »Do not go on vacation! |
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superdog
I Need A Drink
Premium,MVM
join:2001-07-13
Lebanon, PA
| reply to Airplane777
said by Airplane777  :This may be a dumb question, but I will be basically a one-man WISP. I know there are some others here that basically are one-man WISP operations. How do you guys take vacations, trips, and go away with the wife and kids? Seems that with being a one-man operation, you are pretty much tied down to your WISP. Thanks for any info. Thanks. Bob, It can be a PITA sometimes. What I did was setup a group of friends with different skills that were willing to help. I do have 2 partners, but neither of them do any type of climbing, so when anything that can not be fixed by a reboot happens, my best friend Sam comes to the rescue, as he climbs and knows enough about how this stuff works that with Dustins help(One of my partners), we get it up and running again.
Bob, Don't forget that I am only 45 minutes away, and in an emergency, I could probably fix any issues that You may have?. 
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»www.wavecrazy.net Join WISPA today! »www.wispa.org/ |
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gmcintire
Graham
Premium
join:2005-08-09
Blue Ridge, TX
| reply to Airplane777
Vacation? What's that??
I was actually just thinking about this same thing the other day. For my operations I'm planning on getting a trusted friend to be "on call" if I'm away. I'm going to train them on the basic troubleshooting and design of my network. It doesn't make sense to bring them up to 100% of your level, otherwise you wouldn't be needed at all. |
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viperm
Carpe Diem
Premium
join:2002-07-09
Winchester, CA
| reply to mrbueno
Kind of confused on this link it says " The KX101 dongle connects directly to the back of your severs allowing direct non-blocked control of an unlimited number of servers by an unlimited number of users."
Yet in bullet # 1 below it says "Dominion KX101 is a 1-remote user,1-port digital KVM device"
Is this a one device one remote user or is it unlimited like it says above?
Thanks
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ComTrain Certified Tower Climber. American Tower Certified approved contractor |
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cmaenginsb
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-19
Palmdale, CA
| reply to Airplane777
It depends on what level of service you want to provide your customers. In general to provide good service someone needs to be on 2-4 hour response 24/7/365 so the basic answer is you can't go on vacation without someone who has enough knowledge that you can at least talk them through what might need to be fixed.
Personally my advice to anyone starting a WISP by themselves is do not plan on a vacation for at least the first 2-3 years.
A professional WISP is not a part-time business or for those who just want to coast in their golden years. Any type of good internet service provider business requires lots of dedication and hours to provide good service to your customers.
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CCNA, Comtrain Certified Tower Climber |
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cmaenginsb
Premium,MVM
join:2001-03-19
Palmdale, CA
| reply to Airplane777
viperm, I just looked at the device. It is 1 device, 1 user.
The unlimited, non-blocking comment is a comparision with other IP KVMs (like Avocent) which allow 1 or 2 users per KVM which has 16 computers plugged into it. Essentially by using the single devices you get the ability to have 16 users connect to all 16 machines rather than 2 users connected to no more than 1 machine each. Since it's web based I'd imagine you could open seperate web browsers and connect to all 16 or an unlimited number of KVMs simultaneously.
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CCNA, Comtrain Certified Tower Climber |
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PersComp
Premium
join:2005-08-17
Cayce, SC
| reply to Airplane777
My wisp is really not much of an issue yet due to the low number of subs I have so far, but it seems that I cannot shut down for a long weekend without an emergency call for something or another for my PC shop. Last summer I had one during my only long weekend (around my birthday) 
I have not had one this year, and seems like everytime I leave my cell on my dresser when I get home I find VMs on it when I check it. So a weeklong vacation does not seem like it is in my near future either!!! 
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Are these instructions or corrections??? |
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Airplane777
join:2004-06-20
| reply to superdog
Hi Tim:
Thank you much for your post and offer.
After I get this system up and running, I'll have a better idea of what kind of help I might need. But it did worry me a little, when it dawned on me, that I might be married to this system 24/7/365...lol.
I'll have a better idea of how the system will work after I get people on it.
Thanks again |
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Airplane777
join:2004-06-20 | reply to Airplane777
Thank you all for your responses on this important subject. |
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sbrown
join:2006-07-17
Sandy, OR
| reply to Airplane777
I work for a city run Wireless/DSL/Fiber ISP.
While the city has 70+ staff, *I* am the network guy. Heck, I run out the door to fix an outage (darn shotguns) and I tell the women at the front desk whats wrong, I get back and they have forwarded all the calls to my voice mail!! So, basically, everyone else at the city is worthless. You can explain to them the basics, even where we have coverage or pricing and they always pass the call onto me...
And like others said, LEVEL 1 support... I had to spend 2 hours on the phone working through some problem with a customer, it was really a level 1 issue. So, I have gone on vacation, like a Sat Sun Mon Tues or a Fri Sat Sun Mon, but that is about it... |
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pablo2525
join:2003-06-23
| reply to Airplane777
Hi,
What we've done is write monitoring software which ping's key nodes. If they go, then it e-mails my cell phone (I get an SMS). Of course this means that the main gateway can't die (unless you have a backup).
--
Freed from the shackles of my Satellite ISP - private WISP |
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Airplane777
join:2004-06-20
| Hi pable2525:
Sounds neat.
Maybe you can have an external service ping your main gateway.
That pinging program sounds real neat. In general, how do you do the pinging? Is it pretty easy to write the program and implement?
Thanks |
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Ulm
join:2006-09-25
| If you don't want to write something yourself, 'Nagios' ( »nagios.org/ ) is a very decent network monitoring package, if you don't mind using a *nix operating system. It does straight ping up/down monitoring, snmp monitoring, or can monitor individual network services (mail, ftp, http, etc) with paging. And it's free.
Big Brother ( »www.bb4.org/ ) is a similar package.
If you prefer a Windows server, and want something glitzier, What's Up Professional ( »www.ipswitch.com/products/whatsu···ndex.asp ) is pretty nice. $4k for unlimited devices, though. |
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PSWired
join:2006-03-26
Edgewater, MD
| I use nagios and it works very well for my application. There is a paging plugin package that allows you to use a modem and a POTS line to send out pages- this will allow you to continue to receive alerts even if the network the nagios box is running on becomes isolated from the rest of the world. |
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pablo2525
join:2003-06-23
| reply to Airplane777
Hi,
Yes, you're right, the solution is to use an independent host, ideally not using the same ISP. I haven't worried about it because I also have failover software which I wrote.
I have two backup ISP's, one acting as my primary backhaul. I have an agreement with another ISP which provides me failover access to their network. I reciprocate.
My third ISP is a very narrow band connection but it provides connectivity in the event the secondary is down; they have access to it as well.
Obviously it's very important to do QoS - which I do.
As for the ping'ing program. It's a dead easy shell/perl script. For notification, I have it send me an SMS via e-mail - check your cell provider for your cell's SMS e-mail address.
The checking portion simply needs to periodically send a single ping every heartbeat. You can check the exit status of ping to determine success or failure. On failure, have it e-mail you.
The key is when a node revives, you'll want to be alerted as well.
Again, nothing fancy.
Cheers,
-pablo
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Freed from the shackles of my Satellite ISP - private WISP |
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