Well, there goes one of our favorite holidays, Thanksgiving, into nothing more than a memory of fun, a thickening of our waistline and a very useful new device on our network.
(Darn, but that was a fine turkey. We used a method for turkey cooking we learned from federal inmate No. 55170-054, aka Martha Stewart. The next one we cook will also be brined, which has got us all kinds of excited – actually about as excited as when we first deep-fried a turkey, a truly geek dining experience as it combined food with fire and the risk of bodily injury.)
Where were we? Oh, yes, that new device on our network. The gizmo in question is the Network LifeSaver x8 from Rich Media Technologies. This is a power controller with integrated device and service monitoring, control and alerting.
Network LifeSaver is a snappy, fire-engine-red box with two power inputs and eight power output sockets and an RJ45 Ethernet interface, and it comes with all the power cables you might need.
Based on a medical-grade power supply, it is intended to be ultra-reliable. Because cooling fans are a frequent failure point, the Network LifeSaver uses passive cooling. It also uses two independent RISC processors to run the embedded control system. And if all that isn’t groovy enough, to control AC power the Network LifeSaver uses something the company calls “double-layer relay switching.”
You use the Network LifeSaver’s front panel buttons to set it up. The user interface is a 40-character-by-2-line backlit LCD that doubles as a status display. Configuration involves setting the IP address and port of the appliance, the gateway and subnet mask the network uses, and the admin password.
With that out of the way you can install the administrative software on a PC. This is a curiously naive installation: You are instructed to copy the files from the CD to anywhere you please and run the application. This is good because it’s simple and there are no dependencies, and un-installation is clean. On the other hand, it is just not as slick as having an installer.
Once the admin application is running, you need to tell it the IP address and port used by the appliance, and the subnet mask, IP addresses or names for the gateway, DNS servers, mail server details, polling frequency for automated tests and the appliance admin password.
Here’s one of our few complaints: The default port the hardware offers is 0, but if you leave it at that and tell the admin application to also use Port 0, communication will not work and you won’t know why – neither the appliance nor the admin utility tell you that this is an illegal port.
On successful connection the admin utility displays a diagram of the Network LifeSaver and its connections to the mail server, the Internet gateway and each of the eight “channels” – the devices for which the Network LifeSaver is supplying power.
You then can set up each channel with its own port and password, e-mail address for failure notification and tests. The tests can be made to any of the device’s ports (or for that matter, any other device’s ports) using standard or custom data. For example, you could create a simple ping of an address or execute a Web server test that checks if a page can be retrieved.
The penultimate part of the system is the client software – the utility that runs on Windows 2000 and XP systems and supports restarts, shutdowns and memory monitoring (we would like to see support for Linux and interfacing to VMware to shut down individual virtual machines).
Finally, there’s the Control Room Builder software. This is a customizable GUI that can initiate shutdowns and restarts, and display statistics gathered by one or more Network LifeSaver appliances and client software installations. You can dress up the display with graphics and shapes that can be linked to specific channels to show the status of that device.
The Network LifeSaver also comes with an optional Pocket PC application so you can manage the channels through your wireless Pocket PC device.
We really like this system – it is very useful and makes remote AC power control simple and flexible. In terms of scalability, we feel that the Network LifeSaver falls just short of a true enterprise system, as it isn’t extensible through an API and doesn’t support integration with other network management systems. That said, we love it!
The Network LifeSaver costs $1,000 for the appliance plus the management software and Control Room application. The optional Pocket PC software costs $130.
OK, back to cooking and eating. Tales of tighter clothes to gearhead@gibbs.com.
