We have been using a DC powered 28.8 modem made by a company called WTI. It is basically a USR modem ripped open put into a rack mount chassis and converted to take a .25amp DC feed. They have worked well for us so far. -Joe At 01:54 PM 2/10/99 -0600, Sean Donelan wrote:

Hopefully some people will find this related to the operations of their network.

Ah, maintenance modems. Why do they always seem not to work just at the moment you need them.

PG&E released their report on the San Francisco power outage in December. Most of it was the information previously reported. One interesting thing was PG&E lost access to three of their SCADA remote monitoring units because the modems were plugged into utility power instead of a UPS.

Most network providers are aware of the secret hiding in most of our POPs. Those little sporters and courier modems stuffed into a rack somewhere plugged into the nearest available outlet, as the only out-of-band access. Has anyone come up with a solution for powering these forgotten pieces of equipment, which doesn't cost more than the modem itself?

At first you might think it makes sense to power them off the UPS which is powering the rest of your equipment. The only problem is if you are using the maintenance modem to monitor your UPS. This is just one of those things which has bugged me for a few years, but I still haven't come up with a solution I really like. -- Sean Donelan, Data Research Associates, Inc, St. Louis, MO Affiliation given for identification not representation

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