[Sussex] musing about what I'd really like...

[Karl E. Jorgensen]

On Tue, Jun 26, 2007 at 11:26:37AM +0100, Nic James Ferrier wrote:
> This is a work avoidance email.

Work avoidance equals laziness and laziness encourages innovation.  
Therefore work avoidance is good.

> I've been experiencing intermittant network access over the last few
> days.
> 
> I'm told this is because I'm more than 2 miles from the exchange and
> that ADSL is affected by the weather.
> 
> Anyway... every now and then I have to kick off a ping to a well known
> host on the Internet to make sure things are still working.
> 
> This is something a lot of us do for a lot of different reasons I'd
> guess. Right now I'm doing it because my personal net connectivity is
> not good. But I also have periods where I'm pinging servers I am
> managing or HTTP/app pinging services I am running.
> 
> I can do all this from my laptop but I think I'd like a non-my current
> workstation solution so that I don't have to be distracted from my
> work by ping reports and all that.
> 
> I guess what I'm saying is I want something like the nabaztag rabbit:
> 
>   http://www.digitalera.co.uk/gadgets/nabaztag-wifi-rabbit/

"The page your are looking for was not found" ?

Perhaps you meant:
    http://www.digitalera.co.uk/product/nabaztagtag-the-newest-wireless-rabbit.html
?

> but clearly without the rabbit gimmick.
> 
> In terms of software I think it's pretty simple, I want to specify a
> host or a number of hosts and I want to specify a level to ping it at:
> 
> - ICMP
> - TCP (socket open?)
> - HTTP GET 
> - HTTP GET + look for some value in response
> 
> which seems pretty simple. There would have to be some quite tricky
> bits about how much to increase sampling when something started to
> fail.
> 
> What happens when the status fails is what's interesting. I guess the
> easiest way to do it is to associate a sound with a rule. Maybe there
> should be a trigger point at which the sound starts to get more
> urgent. Or maybe a voice should say something.
> 
> In terms of hardware... I've been wondering whether some sort of
> handheld that could run linux would be any good for this. 
> 
> What I'd really like is a device with built in powerline but a WIFI
> device would be ok (and if it loses access to the network it would
> have to hum or go orange or something). It would obviously have to
> play sound as well.
> 
> I wonder if I could find a cheap handheld PC type thing (an IPAQ?) and
> experiment. 
> 
> What do other people think? Is this the sort of thing that might be
> useful?
 
I had similar problems with my ADSL modem - every few weeks it would 
"fall off" the ADSL connection. And if it was really bad, it would need 
a powercycle.

I run nagios anyway (for some worky stuff), so I configured nagios to 
monitor the state of the ADSL modem via a couple of custom scripts (my 
modem has a web interface which can be accessed using wget and grep).

I also invested in a power relay that can be controlled via the parallel 
port (haven't got the details at hand, but it's simple stuff): if a 
"soft reset" of the ADSL modem (via HTTP) doesn't work, it gets 
powercycled!

That did the trick for me - perhaps you can use something similar?

PS: Nagios won't do the other things that wireless rabbit does: it 
doesn't work as an alarm clock, read messages from your friends, weather 
forecasts, look cute or have a belly button. It doesn't even make 
coffee.  But it works.

-- 
Karl E. Jorgensen
karl at jorgensen.org.uk  http://www.jorgensen.org.uk/
karl at jorgensen.com     http://karl.jorgensen.com
==== Today's fortune:
In a gathering of two or more people, when a lighted cigarette is
placed in an ashtray, the smoke will waft into the face of the non-smoker.
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