mrbueno
join:2002-08-03
US
1 edit | Re: One-man WISP & Vacation ? 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! |
