28 Jun
2003
28 Jun
'03
3:26 a.m.
On Fri, 27 Jun 2003, Zane H. Healy wrote:
I'm getting sick of my DSL modem locking up on me.
Some times it will be
good for weeks on end, other times it needs to be powercycled every few
hours. This seems to be one of those every few hours days :^(
It is fairly easy to set my Firewall up to monitor and determine if the
firewall is down. The question is, what would it take to get that Firewall
to powercycle the ()#*&% #(*&% modem on it's own? I seem to recall seeing
something that can be plugged into a Serial port, and you can send it
signals to turn the power on and off on a receptical.
I put together a little system like this for someone before. There are
several devices on the market that allow you to send X-10 codes via
serial. Here's one:
http://www.smarthome.com/1160.html
Here's one in kit form:
http://www.smarthome.com/1150.html
I can't find the website for the one I used, but the one referenced above
is very nice. You'll need an X-10 AM466 Appliance Module to plug the
modem into.
You'll need to write some sort of script on your firewall. I wrote one in
Perl that pings a known good site. It allows a couple retries at a
configurable interval before it goes ahead and power cycles the modem.
Let me know if you want it and I'll send you the script. It's very brief
and uses the pretty poorly designed Device::Serial Perl library.
--
Sellam Ismail Vintage Computer Festival
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