We have two Internet connections in our home (cable and DSL). The entire system is linked via a pair of A/B switches (thanks!). The DSL modem occasionally drops the connection, but for the most part, unless the primary connection goes down we have no way of knowing. Maintaining the secondary connection is important because we have our office’s VOIP connected to it. We can tell if it’s down when the phone doesn’t work, but if we don’t make an outgoing call, we have no idea if clients are trying to reach us. It’s also a minor PITA when we need to switch from one connection to the other and then reset the modem.
In addition to the VOIP, the secondary connection has an ostensibly headless XP box connected to it. The only thing I can imagine is some Internet-based service that listens for an occasional ping or whatnot from the XP box and if it doesn’t receive it auto-generates an email. Do such services exist? Cheaply? Anything else to suggest? What about something that can work locally (second NIC linked to the primary network)?
If you can connect the headless box to both networks (i.e. using two network ports on the machine), you could just periodically “ping” any known server outside over network B, and if that doesn’t work, send an email or whatever over network A (or on the internal LAN). On a unix machine, that would probably be only a few lines of code + some configuration for setting up which services use which connection. Not sure how to do this in XP.
The main advantage of doing it this way is that you can also set it up to do notifications when both external networks go down, and you’re not as reliant on external services.
There are lots of services which will periodically hit a web host, examine the results, and report via email, SMS, page, etc., if the results aren’t as expected.
So depending on your expertise & paranoia level you could set up a trivial website on the XP box, set up your networking appropriately, and have an external service check the XP’s website for the expected “Hi, I’m OK!!:-)” every few minutes.
We’ve used these guys http://www.alertsite.com/ in the past, but there are dozen’s of similar services available for a nominal fee.
What **Superfluous Parentheses **says could also be readily done in XP by any decent Windows IT guy.
Awesome, thanks. Now I have several things to get to in my queue (being the system builder of the house/office makes me the IT guy, but I’m far from decent). Luckily, I have an older post asking about DDNS services and setting one up, so when I get to tackle that I’ll be able to kill two birds with one stone.
I know it takes me a while to get to learn and implement some of these things, but I’m awfully appreciative of the help along the way. Knowing that it’s not a simple solution (er, simple to me) helps put things in perspective and prioritize what I can take on. Thanks!