On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 06:58:46AM -0600, 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.
Question to the list: do you know of an alternative hardware solution under $100 that would suffice -- and be of such quality that an incumbent internet service provider will not thumb their nose at me when I call in to report remote users are down based upon the loss of heartbeats from the remote users?
Pretty much any programmable/flashable little device would be sufficient, I think. Besides WRTG wireless routers as mentioned elsewhere, the smallest device I've set up so far was one of those Seagate docking stations (I think it was a "FreeAgent"?) which I got for $25 new; flashing it to Linux was straightforward, albeit non-trivial. Other cheap devices that are potentially flashable abound (Raspberry Pi, anyone?), including possibly teensy terminal servers, IP phones, used eBay old smartphone with a cracked screen for $20, etc. The ability to run PoE might also be an attractive feature.
The call tree is working (somewhat) to improve accountability and response by the cable service provider ... but it is a waste of their time as there is no formal "record" of outage events to spur the provider to provide refunds for unscheduled service outages. Thus, I am seeking a turnkey quality of service micro appliance that automates (and documents) service outage notifications .. so as to allow me (living in a city and my being on a different internet service provider) to take on the role of calling the rural cable service provider and claim (with authority) that I know that 10 individuals systems (who have the heartbeat appliance installed) are down and that the cable service provider needs to fix the issue...
In this scenario, it sounds like you're depending on end-to-end connectivity, so remember that loss of ping/heartbeat isn't a guarantee that the failure isn't due to something else, though... -- Henry Yen Aegis Information Systems, Inc. Senior Systems Programmer Hicksville, New York