Lan Controlled Power strips?

[maurella]

I am having problems with a DSL modem at a school I help. It locks up periodically and the only way to get it going it to recycle power on it. This is not easy to do from home. Before I take the drastic step of spending the rest of my life trying to communicate with a human at Verizon DSL, I thought I would look for an automated way of performing this. What I am looking for is a power strip which has a LAN port and can be recycled by an action running on a computer on the internal side of the network. I have Linux and Windows systems and am thinking of having a script to monitor access to the external net. If the external network becomes inaccessible, it would send a recycle command to the power device, which could be just a script. Being done automatically rather than interactively, I would prefer to have a method that is not a web interface.

Thanks,

Mike Riley

 

[bcastner]

You can find remotely accesible UPS solutions, but quite honestly the Westall modems I have used just do not lock up.

If yours does, and you are absolutely positive everything is set properly, and absolutely positive that Verizon will not replace it, but a new Broadband DSL modem at the local computer store.

 

[maurella]

Alas, it is not a Westell modem, but a Fujitsu. Verizon has not gotten around to updating the DSL hubs for this prefix yet. Unfortunately, this is for a school I help out, and the impacts are more severe for them than for me at home. I have found something along what I was looking for at

http://www.dataprobe.com/power/iboot.html,

which looks like it is intended to do just what I need for now.

 

[technome]

Also firewalls and dsl modems have a tendancy to freeze up when the power to them is interrupt for a split second, some devices are much more senstive than PCs or servers. Place them on battery backup units.

 

[maurella]

FYI, everyone. We got another Fujitsu modem from Verizon and the problem went away. The thing cost us $100, and I find it very annoying because these will be replaced by Westells as they upgrade their central offices, plus we have to have something that is compatible with their DSL servers, so it seems to me it should be in their realm.

However, had this not been the case, and our only resolution for transparent recovery from DSL lockups would have been to cycle power on the thing, I found a device that looks like it could have done the trick:

http://www.dataprobe.com/power/iboot.html

This is a power switch that has a lan port which you can program via a web interface. I would have configured it to ping our external DNS server and cycle power on the slave device if it timed out.

 

[fs483]

I remember reading about an APC product that can do that but they tend to be pricey.

 

[maurella]

List $275.