Those of us who self-host blogs and email for ourselves and others are obliged to take on the role of administrator and operations staff.
Since cable modems and home routers aren’t really designed with the same level of reliability as enterprise equipment, frequent outages are not uncommon. My regular old Linksys router has a habit of freezing and requiring an unfolded paperclip poke once every ten days or so. This was usually ok because I could get home during my lunch hour, hit the button and get back before any real damage occurred.
The real problem is when I was traveling overseas and couldn’t physically get back to troubleshoot the problem. I enlisted Hollie as backup administrator and she did an excellent job, but I didn’t like having to bother her for something so simple.
Joel on Software had mentioned remote reboot devices and after doing some research I figured out that some of them had auto-ping functionality. The iboot seemed to be (relatively) cheap on ebay and exactly what I needed. I set it to ping my router every 15 seconds and if it detects three no-responses in a row it will power cycle the router. I’ve been doing this for around 2.5 months now and haven’t had any outages.
Oh man, a robot stole my job!
Don’t worry there is still a lot that can go wrong. This just covers the most common scenario.
That is until my staff of humanoid robots comes in.
Robot, make me some waffles!
hello,
Can you pls help me troubleshoot my iBoot config. The iBoot manual indicates the following:
Setting the IP address using the ibootrst.exe
To use ibootrst.exe, the computer running the program must be on the same subnet and network segment as the iBoot is to be programmed to.Same subnet can be directly connected or connected through Ethernet hubs. (NOT routers or switches)
So I was wondering if your iBoot is connected to an Ethernet hub and in turn, the Ethernet hub is connected to the router.
Appreciate your response.
P.S. I have a Linksys BEFSR41 Router and I don’t know if the router successfully assigned an IP address to the iBoot device (which is directly connected to the router)
Yes, it is connected to the same Linksys router/switch directly with no problem. I suspect that is an error in the documentation.