http://www.appneta.com/ might fit your need sets. Jesse Krembs - Data Network Architecture & Planning FairPoint Communications | 800 Hinesburg Rd, South Burlington, VT 05403 | jkrembs@fairpoint.com www.FairPoint.com| 802.951.1519 office | 802.735.4886 cell -----Original Message----- From: A. Chase Turner [mailto:chase@stumpy.com] Sent: Thursday, November 17, 2011 7:59 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Query : seeking a (low cost & secure) turnkey plug-and-play appliance to report network outages 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. Key requirement is the micro hardware appliance will be installed by non-technical elderly end-users -- so, it must be pre-configured and literally plug and play without need for the person installing the appliance to open a web browser to configure. And it must be a secure, good-reputation stand-alone hardware appliance ... because the heartbeat cannot / must not be a service installed on the end-user's computer where it becomes a support burden (e.g., did the end-user turn off their computer? Is their antivirus software blocking the outgoing heartbeat? That the end-user needs to enter a username/password/destination to enable the heartbeat, etc) There is a commercial turnkey solution that meets all the requirements except one -- that the solution cannot exceed $100 per remote appliance : http://www.myconnectionserver.com/learnmore/quality.html 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? MOTIVATION FOR THE ABOVE Ten elderly neighbors to my mother in a rural area suffer frequent internet outages from their one (and only) incumbent cable internet service provider. All of them have learned they will encounter one of the following responses : "You are the only one reporting a problem" OR "We need three reports before we take action" OR "We fixed it. You need to re-boot your modem. (moments later after rebooting cable modem). It must be your computer that is the problem." OR "We know there is a problem. We'll send a crew out to repair the issue next week" These 10 elderly neighbors are fuming ... and they recently formed a call tree -- so that when one person suffers an internet outage, they call other neighbors in the call tree to see if they too have an outage ... and if so, each calls in an outage report (often 20 minutes of being placed on hold) 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... _______________________________________________________________________ This e-mail message and its attachments are for the sole use of the intended recipients. They may contain confidential information, legally privileged information or other information subject to legal restrictions. If you are not the intended recipient of this message, please do not read, copy, use or disclose this message or its attachments, notify the sender by replying to this message and delete or destroy all copies of this message and attachments in all media.

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

On 17 Nov 2011, at 12:58, 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.

Have a look at the Atlas project from RIPE - http://atlas.ripe.net/ Their hardware is aimed at costing 50€ including distribution etc. They have said they were not going to make it available but they might collaborate ? HTH f

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 6:58 AM, A. Chase Turner <chase@stumpy.com> 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. Key requirement is the micro hardware appliance will be installed by non-technical elderly end-users -- so, it must [snip] I think your expectation of finding an off-the-shelf turnkey unit that will do such a specialized thing for $100 or less with no extra work, is a bit unreasonable. Your requirement is such a niche requirement, that there is little demand for such a unit, meaning you won't find a mass produced hardware component out of a box specifically designed to do that specific thing at optimal cost, and general purpose miniature embedded computer boards are cheaper.

From there you need to build the configuration GUI, write some

Although you get the work of building the firmware components to make it do what you intend. Companies that build products for such a niche market need a decent margin for each unit sold, to compensate for low volume. I would say look at something like a Soekris net4501 or other low-cost mini computer board, that you can load a flash card on and install BSD on; I think approximately $90 for board + case, then you need to factor in cost of other components such as flash memory. scripts, and build an image to load on your customized general purpose computing devices. Your end user doesn't need to do all that extra work of scripting or copying data to the unit as long as you provide the pre-assembled unit with your prepared image -- -JH