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Searching for a Satellite Pager?
mcolgin asks: "I need a satellite pager! Why? I own a dot-com and as the only technical person responsible for the 7 servers needed to run the site and it's automated delivery systems, I've got to find out about any problems, before my customers/suppliers do; no matter where I am, especially when I'm: camping in Eastern-Washington; back-country skiing in Whistler; or driving down to Oregon for Mother's Day. I've tried every type of cellphone and pager I can find, but nothing gets a message to me once I get out of populated areas and away from freeways. So, I started looking into Satellite pagers; but I swear, I can't find anything in the local Seattle, WA area and only a couple listings online from Google searches. This has got to be a problem that the Slashdot community has run into, before. Any suggestions?"
Iridium who does satellite phones also does global pagers. The pagers are not too expensive about 150.00 dollars US, but the service is about 127 dollars a month for unlimited pages or you can get the basic plan that i think is around 56 dollars it gives you about 150 pages per month. If your stuff doesn't go down that much i'd get the basic plan. A place that I know that sells it is InfoSat YOur other option is have your cell phone text messaged. I usually never not have service. If I do it's not for very long, and when i get back into a populated area or get reception i get my messages right away. The point is, what if you get a page but you can't call anyone because you have no reception. That would fustrate me more.
The reason you only got "a couple listings" is because Iridium is pretty much the only game in town, and there's pretty much only one pager. There weren't exactly a lot of devices made for this market. It's no small feat to operate a global voice/data satellite network. There are only a "couple" of other providers (geared more toward government, military, and enterprise, and without "pager" offerings): InMarSat and GlobalStar, for example.
The Motorola 9501 for Iridium is, as I said, essentially the only satellite pager:
http://www.iridium.com/product/iri_product-detail. asp?productid=445
http://shop.infosat.com/pagers/
http://www.infosat.com/services/iridium/motorola_9 501_pager.htm
http://www.satwest.com/satellite_pagers_mi9501.htm l
More...
Of course, you may be interested in a satellite handset, not strictly a "pager", than can also get email and numeric messages. Keep in mind, though, that all of these satellite devices are subject to normal satellite requirements, e.g., line of sight to the sky. Yes, sometimes they'll "kind of" work in vehicles, wooded areas, etc., and you will get confirmed delivery of messages once you're again in range, but these things aren't exactly set up to work in houses and buildings. You may have no choice but to have a conventional cell phone/pager AND a satellite device for when you're remote, and have your automated systems and/or people try both devices.
For others in a similar boat, but not quite as remote as the submitter, you may also consider a conventional 2-way or 1.5-way nationwide pager, which provides delivery confirmation and re-attempts if you're temporarily out of range. But if you know you're going to be out of range for a while, you pretty much restricted to something like one of the satellite solutions. Consider a mobile phone. Most providers' digital networks offer email service, numeric "paging", and even true TAP/IXO paging. Just look into a provider that covers your area(s).
A bit of history on Iridium: Iridium was the satellite phone service launched by Motorola on Sept 23, 1998, when the last satellite of its global constellation was in place. Handset prices (over $3000) and airtime fees (several dollars per minute), as well as attempting to market to ordinary folks doomed the service from the beginning. Motorola decided to end the Iridium service on March 17, 2000, at 11:59pm. After billions were spent on the 66 satellites, and the $1 million per month that it cost Motorola for Boeing operate the satellites, Motorola initiated plans to deorbit and destroy the constellation. Various investor groups attempted to save Iridium, and the Defense Department even provided $72 million to keep the satellites operational (in the face of concerns of debris from the deorbited satellites actually hitting someone on earth, which NASA pinned at 1 in 250). In any event, Iridium Satellite LLC successfully purchased the assets of the $7 billion Motorola Iridium program in November 2000 for a mere $25 million:
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0011/16iridium/
http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0103/29iridium/
The new Iridium, launched in March 2001, attempts to fix the shortcomings of the original by expanding beyond satellite voice telephone service, into data, video, realtime monitoring, and special applications in markets such as mining, oil/gas, m
Yea, sleep in the server room.
OK, so it took me all of three minutes to find what you are looking for.
First, I googled Satellite Pager and found out that Motorola used to make a pager called the 9501 for well known satellite phone company Iridium. Next, I checked a few of the first links. I found that the Motorola 9501 has been discontinued but originally retailed for $149.95. I also found that the service had a $100 activation fee and was $69 a month, and Iridium still offers it. Ahah! Theres something! So then I clicked on the seventh link down and found out that a company called World COmmunications Center sells refurbished ones for $195. You can buy the pager from them and activate it with Iridium's service. There's a link that says How to Buy on the WCC page that lists their phone numbers, including one in Portland, OR. Close enough for Seattle for ya?
Now I could probably find more, but I have to be back at work in 20 minutes and don't really feel like more googling. So enjoy, I hope this works for you.
Ask Slashdot: For When You're Just Too LazyTM
And oh yeah...FP!
I googled "satellite pager service" and got this:
S atellite+Pager+Service/page/6
http://www.wcclp.com/index.php/phpmPage/Services_
if by local to Washington you mean "anywhere on the planet", then this should work.
http://www.infosat.com/services/iridium/motorola_9 501_pager.htm
This might help you a bit.
..you're a good candidate for WiMax and VoIP.
Besides, it's probably cheaper to hire some guy that always knows where you are and will physically come out and find you if something happens.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Will it run Windows for pagers?
How about an Iridium Pager?
Call them directly on +1.866.947.4348 or email sales@iridium.com
I do not work for Iridum.
- Never leave town.
- Delegate some responsibilities to someone else.
Entrepreneurs also need to be able to "let go" just a little bit by hiring responsible folks to share the burden of situations like this. If you continue to try doing things all on your own like this, I'm inclined to think you'd have nothing but headaches, followed by burn-out.I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
I mean, it's a satellite pager! Isn't the idea that it works anywhere? A Google search for satellite pagers turns up plenty.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
Check and see if the parks you go camping in have wi-fi. I believe that some parks are starting to do that more and more now.. In fact, if you leave your wi-fi on, most of the time you can get a continuous series of connections driving down any major road due to common lack of security :-)
Get your life in order. Either hire someone to
give you the free time, or realize you're in a
phase of your life where fun vacations are not an option. Get used to this. Pagers will always fail.
With a human, you can at least use employement
to make sure they're at the keyboard.
I personally recommend you examine your plans
to provide reliable service to your customers,
and critically evaluate whether advice from
slashdot is part of your solution matrix.
How do you have time for all of these little trips away and vacations if you run a company? I doubt your employees, if they're dedicated, are able to take that kind of time off. Yet you, somehow, can? Doesn't sound like you're very dedicated to it. /Spoken as someone who has never taken a vacation or holiday in their 30 years.
Takes many vacations...*check*
Is the only one responsible *check*
MUST maintain 7 servers (e-mail servers?) *check*
Talks about clients and his "dot-com business *check*
Question: Are you a SPAMMER?! Cause you sure fit the profile
I can't find anything in the local Seattle, WA area
It's a satellite phone. Order it from anywhere and it should work, right? That's the point. Any one of those Google results would work. Here's one.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
This has got to be a problem that the Slashdot community has run into, before. Any suggestions?
Yes. The dot-com boom ended several years ago. Ditch this company and become a waiter, before you go retroactively bankrupt.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Hire a lackey. Find a guy/gal down at your local LUG. Seattle has lots of underemployed, overqualified geeks at the moment. Show him the ropes.
Sure, he (please substitute she if appropriate) won't know how to fix everything. But he will call your customers to let them know a technical person *is* on site, ring your cell incessantly till you pick up, put your pager on the wardialer.. And for simple stuff, IE, service didn't come up on restart, or UPS warning some of the batteries just went south, you just saved yourself a trip back to Seattle.
.sig: Now legally binding!
It sounds like you need more people, offer some extra server space and bandwidth to somebody who would be willing to watch the server 24/7 and would always know what the status of the server is, and also know what to do to fix it...
A good candidate, would be to find a guy interested in a Cs:s or HL2DM serv, sell a 24 player serv to him for 10 bux a month and the condition that if the server goes down, he should immeadiately contact somebody...
I'd be more then willing...
Your skill in reading has increased by one point!
And what good does knowing your servers are down when you're out in the boondocks, outside of cell coverage and miles from the nearest POTS jack.
Either don't go out of range or get someone else to share the responsibility.
Why don't you just hire someone else to run those things?
Oh, I bet I know why. You're one of those bosses who owns a small company, and is a control freak who HATES the fact that he has to have employees at all, because everyone but you is an idiot, and it's impossible to train other people to do things exactly as YOU would do them. Because, as everyone knows, your way is the only right way.
So, yeah, good luck with the satellite pager search.
I don't know about satellite pagers. But if you are the single point of failure for an operation you own, large enough to require 7 servers to operate, I suggest you examine your budget, and maybe your ego. And find room to train an alternate who can relieve you of that duty sometimes. Because your satellite pager might survive your preemption, by a family crisis, or a skiing/camping/driving accident, or a really good night's "sleep". But your system won't survive a chance outage at that unavoidable downtime. If you care about your customers/suppliers, you'll ensure remove your system's 24/7/365 dependence on that part with less than 99.9999% availability.
--
make install -not war
I know of a good sat pager solution, but it only works while kicking back with some babes in a cigarette boat off Miami. Funny thing.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
We back up data onto tapes (or external drives) to ensure that any loss is minor; we have backup hard drives to make our data safer; we even have backup machines so a blown PSU or similar won't seriously affect downtime. Put simply, through redundancy we achieve reliability.
Now you tell me that you are the only person who is looking after seven different servers? And you think the best solution to this is better communication? Umm, no. The best solution to this is to contract somebody else to act as your backup.
Beside Iridium you can also try inmarsat wich can be used with a subscription service or a pay as you go. Starting price of the terminal is about 3000$. ;-).
:-).
Of course Thuraya might be an attractive option if it wouldn't have the "slight" dissadventage of not working in the US
But seriously if you have seven servers and only one tech, and that tech is yourself either your business plan needs a serious rewamp or you should quit your boss
Or your are working for an assosiation and then you should still try to convince your members to accept a fee increase.
Because all seven servers will break down at precisely the moment your phone battery dies, and a grizzly is between you and your car.
"I own a dot-com and as the only technical person responsible for the 7 servers needed to run the site and it's automated delivery systems"
Ok, then maybe you shouldnt spend all of your time out camping and snowboarding then?
Just a suggestion.
Any when you get your page saying all your servers are down, what exactly will you do then hundreds of miles away from the NOC?
"When they invent bitch slaps that can go through a monitor you better f'ing duck" --deft (253558)
Why, YES HE IS!
While this sounds plausible on the surface, what is the real use? Take the scenario at face value. He's camping in the woods somewhere. The pager goes off in the night. Let's say that he hosting an ecommerce site and the database keeps going down so products aren't showing up on the site. So, he packs up (an hour or so), drives back to Seattle (another 2-3 hours), and then rushes in wired on drive-thru coffee to fix the problem before anyone knows about it. Am I missing something?
Before you start with the whole "He can tell his IT people to fix the problem," remember that he said he is the only IT person in the company. What's he going to do, call his accountant and talk her through viewing the logs and using vi to edit the config files or something?
Wait! Maybe he plans to mind-meld with the sat-pager and surf the virtual net back to the server and fight the bugs like in Tron! This guy is cooler than I first thought. I'm in awe.
The previous comment is purposely vague and generalized, but all of the facts are completely true.
Erm, either your site isnt really so critical you can drop everything and head from the woods to fix it.. or you can pay a PFY to do it for you? btw - i liked the combination of http://www.digitalcandle.com/asterisk.html and http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-users/2 004-January/032521.html
Brain(s): 0.0% user, 1.3% system, 0.1% nice, 98.6% idle
you're a good candidate for WiMax and VoIP.
Yesh, the last time I was in the woods a hundred miles from the nearest road I was amazed what the 802.11 sniffer was pulling in. I guess the grizzly bears use it to track the tastiest hikers or something and get out the word.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
<sarcasm> If you are that important, put in a roll-a-way and stay at work.</sarcasm>
You have two options..
1) You need to go and find a consulting firm who, for a fee, is willing to be avaialble when you're not. You probably want somebody who is not too big, and local too, so they'll be flexible. If you can work it right, you might even be able to get it where you just have to call them 30+ days in advance and schedule them for when you'll be out of range.
2) Simplify your operations. Anything that you can't explain in 5 minutes to a reasonably intelligent person is too complex. This will have two benefits. 1- simpler systems will tend not to break as often, as you can see the problems on cursory examination. 2- You can trust somebody who maybe isn't a sysadmin/uebercoder like you, but can handle a bash prompt.
I've adopted #2 now, but in the past had #1. #2 is _by far_ the better long term solution.
SpamapS -- Undernet #Linuxhelp
Ok, so you now know that one of your servers is down. What next? If you need a satellite pager just to get paged about your servers what kind of internet connectivity are you going to have to fix the problem?
I carry a pager for work as well, but I find that the real problem is not getting the pages but getting internet access. Although I am lucky enough to be in a pager rotation. So I just plan on being near a computer when it's my turn.
Get a cellphone with a wide range of bands, so that you are sufficiently covered no matter where you go. Couple that with worldwide coverage, and you can get SMS or MMS (even email) on your phone. I suspect you already have a phone, so why have another item to lug around?
today is spelling optional day.
One of the spaceflightnow.com links above says...
A total of 88 satellites were launched beginning in May 1997, but several malfunctioned after arriving in orbit.
Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space built the satellite platforms and said the craft would operate up to eight years. The Iridium constellation is divided into six groups of satellites circling 421 miles above Earth.
So... 1997 + 8 years = 2005.
Are they replacing satellites that have reached EOL ?
This msg is brought to you by the letter 'W'.. for Worthless Wuss
OK, I give...what exactly does one do when you are in the woods, and your server goes down?
...get a life.
You could do it with packet and a tower in your back yard and a few hundred dollars initial investment in gear.
1. Get your license.
2. Throw up a tower.
3. Get a pII 300 for a packet box. plug it into the network. Run nagios. There's some linux scripts for getting nagios to talk to *nearly_any* software. Such as aprs. using X.25 or similar.
4. Get a laptop for your car and an HF antenna + mobile 100w rig.
5. Have it send out automated heartbeats every ten minutes w/callsign. And warnings when it's worse.
6. Have lappy pump juice into a claxon or similar, mounted on your car under the hood.
Good for a few hundred miles.
Considering my mom talked with people around the world with 100 watrs all the time using PSK31 (about IM chat speed text data transfer.)
You could do better with directional antrenna.
-=fshalor
I'm in roughly the same boat as this guy. I currently have 4 servers on the net that are pretty much mission critical and at least one for the last 8 years or so. Now they just work.... I go for months without the tiniest hiccup. However bad things do happen and they generally seem happen when I'm camping or in another state or whatever.
If I knew with 100% certainty that I could be contacted if there was a problem I would be able to enjoy my vacations much more. But since I can't I['m always driving around to find cell coverage so I can check my vm which pisses off my wife or I don;t check vm and am worried the whole damn time.
I tried finding some people to watch over things for me but they're either too stupid, or I find my apps installed on the competition's server a few weeks later. Now granted I live in the middle of a friggin cornfield in Indiana so I don't have access tot eh kind of talent this guy probably has.
Those of you who're suggesting that he sleep in the server room or hire more help since he manages "7 whole servers" should probably try running something besides Windows on some decent hardware.
Bah!
Hire Me!
I'll run your servers! I don't eat much and I won't take up much space...
Why not make little wifi or cell repeaters and drop em like breadcrumbs as you go off into the wild blue yonder.
Perhaps you should consider fixing your servers and systems so that they don't go down. Let's consider the potential problems:
1) Link to net down? Geographically diverse colo
2) Hardware failure? Redundant server with automatic failover
3) Fire? See #1
4) Power outage? Battery backup, autofailover generator, and see #1 above
5) Application issues or errors? Fix the code.
None of the above requires a satellite pager or cell phone.
Let's see...2 web servers, one for production, one for DR. 2 database servers, one for production, one for DR. That's 4. What are the other 3 for? As others have said, sounds like you're a spammer.
I have never found myself out of range of GSM anywhere other than Japan (CDMA/WCDMA only) in the last few years.
I would recommend something like a Nokia 9500. Importantly, get a foreign SIM that will roam across multiple US operators. You will always get a signal from one of them. Bingo - ssh, vnc, web browsing, sms, mms and IM over gsm, gprs and WLAN all in one pocket device.
Seriously - do you really need satellite? Because you are going to have to carry a bigger battery, a laptop (because the devices themselves are less capable) and a car mounted aerial.
Hire a sysadmin, you lazy rich bastard (j/k:-)
Apparently you have enough time and money to camp, ski and travel while running a dotcom, so why not help the economy by hiring a skilled junior who will keep the servers healthy when you're away?
I'd say a new local hire in the Seattle area would expect maybe $50k starting out.
Geez,
how the hell is a score of -1 possible? Are we in the imaginary plane now?
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Simple cheapest solution: hire someone.
Never mind that satelite pager is still not 100% reliable (nothing is)but what the heck are you going to do when you get that page???? Now you need satelite based data service for your laptop. And how much can you get done at 2400 baud(isn't it the bandwidth cap for irridium?) I am not even mentioning insane latency making ssh nearly impossible??? And what happends when its a hardware issue that you need to call someone? So now you need a satelite phone. You can go on forever like that, spend loads of money and still never have a reliable effective solution.
Hire someone to be your backup or be forever tied to the server room. Or find a job that understands how to run a business.
-Em
RelevantElephants: A Somatic WebComic...
but is not a cardinal rule of business that no one person should be indespensible? And equally so, say you're out having your vacation and something does go wrong and you we're contacted via your satellite pager. How are you going to contact your sysadmin back home and what are you going to do, drive or fly all the way back home? Hours could go by and the customers you want avoid inconveniencing would have to wait for your return before restoration of service.
You need to invest in a good technical team if it is that important, never mind a pager.
The cemeteries are full of people who deem themselves indispensable. If you're not able to leave your pager at home when you're off, you've got the wrong job.
"Simplify, Simplify". H.D. Thoreau had a point, don't you think?
NN
No fun there? Get a serious cell phone and move to Europe.
Their global 'coverage' is limited as displayed on the map on their site. For one, Africa is completely uncovered.. so if youre smack dab in the middle of central Africa, theres NO way to communicate back except maybe long range ham radio.
The polar regions are also barely covered; that was the reason I was looking for a pager in the first place.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
Interesting idea, but Amateur Radio is restricted to non-commercial use. "The Amateur Radio Service is a voluntary noncommercial communication service, used by qualified persons of any age who are interested in radio technique with a personal aim and without pecuniary interest" (FCC Website).
the story's already out of date? If it was a recent post he'd be skiing in Windows XP.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Brilliant solution, and an excellent example of the wide range and advanced nature of many Amateur technologies.
One problem....
He's running a business, and well that's not really amateur than is it? What you are proposing is actually illegal.
Please see part 97 of the FCC rules, specifically section 113, 'Prohibited transmissions'
FCC rules 97.113
-Mikey P
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't understand why this has been modded up. Okay, let's say you find a solution that allows you to get a message that your servers are down while you are fishing for salmon in the Yukon. What the hell are you going to do about it? Worry yourself to death? If you can't even call anyone or access your servers while you are out of pocket, what is the point of knowing there is a problem?
Before I wrap up, I wanted to tell you about this totally sweet thing I found on teh interwebs. You can put stuff into it, and it finds stuff like what you put in!. How cool is that?!!!111!shift-one
Personally, I would *never* do business with a one-man company in any long run deal. If you get sick (or worse), I have no service anymore. It's a bad, bad business decision. As others said: you do not need a satellite pager. You need a staff.
Thank you KC8JHS for pointing this out so I didn't have to. HAM + BIZ = ILLEGAL. What he might be able to do is increase the range of his cell phone with an external antenna designed for a car or something similar (not sure if a yagi for a cell is illegal, but it would be great) with a ground plane added (stick it to a cookie sheet maybe?) might improve his signal dramatically, provided he was on high ground. -KB3KJN
your fancy-assed sat-pager goes off - critical emergency back at the NOC...
your options:
drop ski poles, grab pager, read message, hit tree (SPLAT)
if you don't hit tree or are in lounge and can read your pager message (If you're not spending time with a cute ski bunny on each arm you either need psychiatric help or you may as well buy a cott and sleep in the server room. It's the only action you're gonna get!)
None of the places you mention as "remote" are more than a couple hundred miles from Seattle. A conventional satellite paging system with a North American footprint should do you fine; fifteen years ago when I had a boss who wanted to be able to get me out of bed wherever I was, he made me carry a SkyPager.
Sheesh. Kids these days...
Clearly, you don't travel much. Get more than 10 or 15 miles from an interstate highway and there is no GSM coverage. Kansas is bad, Nebraska is impossible. Try this map: http://www.rentcell.com/coverage-map-usa-gsm.htm Canadian GSM coverage is, of course, worse. http://www.canadagsm.com/english/html/coverage/fs_ cov_map.htm
If you want digital CDMA coverage, it's not QUITE as bad, but it's not _good_
http://www.rentcell.com/coverage-map-cingular.htm
http://www.rentcell.com/coverage-map-airtouch.htm
Really, for those who need to travel outside the urban core it's an analog world still. A good yagi cut to the center of the analog cell-phone band, a bag or high power car mounted moble phone, and an account with a carrier with good analog rollover gets you the best coverage in the US, but I can't actually CONNECT at some of my customers sites without the yagi.
Sprints analog roam map probebly gives the most accurate summary AMPS coverage available in the US.
http://www1.sprintpcs.com/explore/coverage/Natwide Netwk.jsp?FOLDER%3C%3Efolder_id=1441749&CURRENT_US ER%3C%3EATR_SCID=ECOMM&CURRENT_USER%3C%3EATR_PCode =None&CURRENT_USER%3C%3EATR_cartState=group&bmUID= 1114732276847
Notice all the white areas? No service. Not even analog. Zip.
You don't get out much do you?
Look at all the traffic digitalcandle got got by asking slashdot a question. He IS a spammer!
...
1. Create spam company
2. Get it posted on the front page of slashdot
4.
5. Profit!
I used to have an Iridium pager, when the service wad $70 a month for unlimited pages. I had all my emails (at least, the first 150 characters) forwarded to it. As another poster mentioned they changed the pricing and now unlimited paging is almost twice as much.
However, I used this thing all over the world, and it performed wonderfully. The paging signal is much stronger than the phone signal, and works well indoors as long as you are not deep inside a large building. I even was able to put it next to the porthole in my cabin on the lower level of a drillship off the coast of Angola. I got my pages perfectly.
The best thing was I picked up the pagers for $30 on ebay.
I'd have to agree with the people who say "You don't need any of this crap... You need a staff."
Sure, you may be camping in Eastern-Washington or back-country skiing in Whistler and a satellite pager can tell you that everything's gone pear-shaped back in the server room, but then how do you plan to act on that notice in a timely fashion?
It's no good being three hours from civilisation only to find that your servers are down and you can't do anything about it =)
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
This ain't C. You don't have to end every statement with a semicolon.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Never mind the mountains. What happens if you are on a trip, have an accident and are a week in intensive care?
I know a person who has his own hosting company and several servers and I also know he is NOT available 24/7. He hired another company to do that for him.
Don't live to work, work to live.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
- Does he want the reputation of a guy who thinks his IT business is as important as heart transplant surgery? If you're an on-call surgeon, you have an excuse to leave in the middle of weddings, funerals, dinner-parties, movies, hikes, religious services, heart-to-heart conversations with loved ones, etc. If you're not leaving for life-or-death matters, it generally starts to look rude. (If you're the minion and the alternative is getting fired, then you have an excuse. This guy is the owner. No excuse.)
- Even if he has no social life whatsoever, he'll eventually be hit by the flu, medical emergencies, jury service selection waits (or depositions or a court case), a car accident, or other events that all the willpower in the world won't get you out of.
He needs a backup. If I was a potential customer, I wouldn't care how many paths there are to connect to him... carrier pigeon, ham radio, long-range-telepaths... he himself is the potential single point of failure.Dude,
First clone yerself off. Then make sure the "other" you is like indian or something so he won't want a lot of money. Then just have him come cover you when you need to check out. Just make sure he's smarter than this guy...
From the main page, it seems that one of Digital Candle's products is Go!Zilla -an ad blocker and a download manager.
According to the site GoZilla is Ad-Free.
Which begs the question - why is Go!Zilla offering companies the chance to advertise with GoZilla. I mean, if the product isn't adware/spyware, how would you advertise with it?
I have blog like everyone else
I used to run misterhouse at my old dwelling, I had it set up to do basic alarm functions based on a door switch, and an ibutton for authentication. I had it play clips in the ST computer voice as prompts. "Please enter security authorization", "authorization accepted" etc. I always wanted to find a voice synth that I could just plug in to misterhouse. A man can dream.
The reason you can't find one is that besides you, no one wants a satelite pager. What you want is a satelite phone. I think you'll find that search turns up a few more hits.
Get a phone or pager that specializes in that corridor and the areas you vist.
Like a Verizon phone and a Sprint phone, or whatever.
Also consider the "less" cheap Sony Ericsson line of phones.. or phones with quote "excellent call quality"
Call quality usually translates into more signal sensitivty in the same area where other phones just don't pick up a signal.
I switched from Motorola phone to Sony and went from barely 1 bar of signal to 6 bars in the same exact place.. sacrifice feature bloat for dam reliability.
And consider analog versus digital roaming features.. as will as GSM coverage.. cell phones look simple.. but they break down into lots of categories and technologies.. GSM is I believe one of the latest signal technologies and isn't widely available outside metro areas.
I know when I visited Cannon Beach up there a few years ago my "digital" phone switched to "analog" romaing automatically.. and most people who's cell phones didn't work were astonished that in the Washington state area, analog coverage was far far better than digital coverage.. at that time.
And I've heard other stories about Seattle.. far from being a bastion of high tech.. the services industries surrounding the Microsoft campus tend to be extremely low tech.. they may have transplanted the technies.. but they didn't transplant the infrastructure of the big city up there.. check it out.. what your looking for may not be in newer gadgets.. but actually in older lower tech!
Tranlate that into looking for quote "world phones" they tend to be big and clunky.. and have tri-band support or more.. and cost alot for few features.. but they work.. and most have SMS paging capabilites or some text paging features of some kind.
At the very least, have a modem call your number and don't even bother to leave a voice message, the simple fact it logs a call to your phone from a number you know is associated with your server room should alert you so that you know to check the server room.
To make this entirely legal, just get your amateur TX to send you a one-line weather and home-status report on HF every 5 minutes, along the lines of:
:-)
Temp 25 degs, Pres 900 mbar, Humid 35%, Home ABCDEFG...
where the final string of letters indicates your Home Status. Eg. an 'A' might mean your heating has turned on, 'B' might mean that your curtains have opened, 'C' that your home phone just rang, 'D' that your home pager is beeping, etc etc.
This is perfectly legal, a very typical application of amateur packet radio for delivering personal data. Note than a beeping noise at home does not constitute business data.
It's already spelled out for you.
Starting score: 1.
Totally off-topic modifier: -2
If you add those, you get -1.
Google "basic arithmetic" if you're still confused.
http://www.globalstar.com/
Look into the GS-1600 tech specs. You'll find it's a reasonable option, since it contains passive (ie., receive only) text paging features. Also, it contains data calling, including IP support via a special number.
There also another bunch of tech docs. I've been using it for 6 months (for deploying mobile patrol units in the Amazon, using a modified board to run on a embedded PC on a Boat), and they're quite affordable, considering the problem as is.
may now have sms functionality
m s.htm 0 8/001300.htm
http://www.gmpcs-us.com/products/globalstar/Gst_s
http://www.satphonestore.com/sms.htm
http://www.textually.org/textually/archives/2003/
Definately check out http://www.iridium.com/ and ask how recieving an SMS works - same as normal?
A blog I run for the wealth
He has acquired Bulletproof FTP & Gozilla & some other download software tools. Most of his customers already have the software.
So if the server goes down for a few hours no big deal. But if it goes down for a couple days, well that is something. Same with his website promotion services...
There are places here where not even satphones work. Dad ran a mining camp just outside Mt Tom Price for a little while, which had a "phone booth", a white square meter painted onto the bare rock upon which one could stand and one's satphone may or may not work (it had good and bad days). One could also stand there with a cellular phone (CDMA or GSM) and some of them would work (the ones that did work, worked more reliably than the satphone).
The residents reckoned that it was all of the iron ore playing silly buggers with absorption and reflectance but nobody could say for sure. 'Phones simply did not work anywhere else near the campsite.
I have no idea how they discovered the "booth". I do know that if a real 'phone booth had been available, some wag would have loaded it onto a truck and sent it out there.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
My first impression is that mcolgin must be lacking something more than a satellite pager. If he wants to be the sole technical resource for critical servers then he has no business going on hikes in the wilderness and such. If he wants to go on hikes, he has no business being the sole technical resource for critical servers. That's not so complicated, is it?
Where does this lame crap come from? Oh, wait... this is slashdot.
What's next?
I was in an Alltel store recently getting a new phone when a woman walked in and asked if Alltel had any phones that would work in Iraq. The store people said no, so she asked where the nearest Suncom dealer was.
Welcome to South Carolina.
Direct away from face when opening.
...what you need is to slap the crap out of some executives there and get them to hire AT LEAST 1 more person to cover you arse.
Where I work, we're always hearing about how we need to be sure to properly document and do knowledge transfers to others on our teams just in case the lead gets hit by a bus. As much as we laugh about it, it couldn't be more true, because after the sad eMails go around the office, people will want to know how what the dead guy was responsible for is gonna be kept going.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
Anyway, GoZilla is hooked up to a DSL conx (netcraft says): dsl254-055-066.sea1.dsl.speakeasy.net
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
What good is it to get a page when you are back country skiing if you are truly the only tech guy there is? If the servers are all down, you can't very well VPN/telnet in (or choose your remote technology) and fix the problem. Bottom line is you're still stuck away from the machines. I'd have to think it would be more cost effective to have a slightly trained person monitor the status, via a normal phone or pager and then leave you a message at your hotel or whatever. Then you can call this person back and walk them through fixing it.
It seems like the satellite pager is a bit of overkill I guess, at least in my eyes. Just hire an assistant.
I live in Renton,WA and am looking for work in that area =) I would need a little training but am willing to work for cheap and work for free while i train! O'Doyle Rules!
Giggidy Giggidy Gigg-a-dy
This guy ain't tech, he's a PHB!
If he's the only tech the company has, they're all doomed. I can't wait until he gets hit by a bus, or runs off with a hooker in Las Vegas. What would the company do then?
The answer to his problem (not his question) is to hire a second person to admin the machines. Both carry an inexpensive pager, and adhere to an "on call" rotation. As long as they both do their rotations, someone should always be able to take care of issues in a timely fashion.
Amazing.
Oh, and his site sucks.
He'd be expected to come in from that vacation to fix the problem. After 3 years of having vacations ruined, he'd elected to not even leave the office, even when on vacation.
when you get hit by a bus. :-)
What you really need is someone to back you up, so your site doesn't ride entirely on you. Then you can actually have a life.
Let me get this straight:
1) You are the only sysop.
2) You've got 7 servers that must be up 24/7.
3) And you haven't even a single backupped spare with a watchdog to switch over when things go haywire?
Sorry, pal, but you're either bullshitting us or you gotta get some basics of your outfit sorted out before thinking of a satellite pager or other exotic stuff - that is not your current problem.
Having dealt with that, I recommend http://www.iridium.com/ for all your satellite communication needs. They are the satellite phone people. And they have a satellite SMS aswell.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Even the satellite pager does not work everywhere. I had one for two years for a previous job and had problems getting pages in basements of buildings. I also ran into a few instances where my boss paged me but I never recieved it, then sometimes got it a day later.
Oh the irony, a spammer asking slashdot for help, and getting it before someone spots the obvious.
*tries to recover quickly.*
Hey, original poster, if you're out hiking in a stormy region and looking for a great satellite pager, you can't beat the reception on this model.
...and do it mostly without dups.
u m.html
This script or one like it can page your "normal" two-way pager, sense whether you got it, and only send via Iridium if not. You can't rely on Iridium only, esp. in areas with many obstructions, because the network can't ask the pager if the message was received -- that is, it is one way only and therefore less reliable.
http://homepage.mac.com/jogomu/jgm.org/snpp_iridi
Opt-in e-mail is not spam. Opt-out email is spam.
A lot of opt-out marketers like to defraud their customers, claiming that their opt-out lists are opt-in lists.
Lots of "opt-in" email isn't really opt-in. It means things like "somebody once didn't uncheck a borderline invisible box on a page when we told them they could win an ipod". And when we send them a message that says to unsubscribe it only unsubscribes them from THAT mailing list. Often it means "we spam people and call it opt-in to make you think it's not spam, but we're lying"
I have no idea about this particular company, of course.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
from here
DARPA funded WolfPack technology is a soda can sized pod, deployed about 1 per sq. km, is designed to replace or supplement similar technologies that currently reside in aircraft. Because of proximity to enemy radios, less power is required to jam signals. Ad-hoc networking and multi-hop routing are used to control and retrieve data from the network, which can also monitor enemy communications in addition to jamming them. The pods are designed to last for about 2 months.
Yay me!
I'm not licensed, but I did study for the test at one point. Another prohibited transmission is "messages in codes or ciphers intended to obscure the meaning thereof." That means even if he wasn't a business, SSH is out, right?
Larger than a typical pager but several satellite telematics tracking units will work & offer global coverage:
Google axonn and globalstar (axtracker), stellar and orbcomm (DS-100, ST2500), satamatics and inmarsat.
All work as I have tested these personally...
Thanks, Joe KB9LZB
Globalstar is what you need (plus .. oh, you'll figure that part out on your own.)
Heard any good sigs lately?
Seriously, even if you get your satellite pager, what are you going to do when it goes off? You've already said you are in the boonies somewhere, so how are you going to do anything to solve the problem?
Like others have said, delegation and not technology is the solution to your problem.
That's correct, an encrypted channel is expressly forbidden, but there is an exclusion. Codes and ciphers are allowed for guaranteeing the integrity of a communication to prevent trespass, for example encrypted passwords or keys to allow only one specific person access to a private mailbox.
That provides a simple means for passing coded information along, because it is impossible in theory to detect the presence of a covert channel operating over a variant authentication mechanism. (Variance is almost mandatory in RF, given the ease of capture and replay.)
In this application the person would not need to go that far though, since an alert occurring at his home wouuld not normally require military-strength hiding.
I've sometimes been faced with the need to rescue a server from far away: not quite as far from civilisation as the questioner, but maybe an internet cafe in a different country. To solve some of the problems I wrote Anyterm (http://chezphil.org/anyterm/) which provides a terminal on a web page using Javascript, XmlHttpRequest and an Apache module.
For my next project I'd like to provide something similar on a mobile phone. Of course if you have a hi-tech phone that can run Java programs or whatever it's quite easy (and already done). But I don't, so I want to do it over WAP. The main difficulties are the small screen and keyboard and the absence of XmlHttpRequest-like functionality. Any suggestions (or pointers to existing solutions) would be appreciated!
And this explains his actions. See the other posts
What good is it knowing something is down if there is nothing you can do about it?
I hate sigs.
I actually hadn't thought of that for one major reson. I work for a school and organizations. Since the data we've been looking at transfering has no commercial value is isn't intended on being sold but given to the public domain... that's where I come from.
Ah well.
So, at the least, he could order his pizza through the system (which IS allowed.) and a few more people looked up psk31 on their googleboxen.
On the other hand. If it's that critical, and sat doesn't cover his realm good enough, he *really* needs a backup person or a less adventerous lifestyle.
A few on call guys I know work in groups of 4, one has the *beeper of DooM* each weekend, and they trade off days through the week. When they have said *beeper of DooM*, they make sure to stick locally.
-=fshalor
i used to be responsible for a bunch of servers in Costa Rica and I liked the service Skytel Offered ....
... /dev/hda3 full )
.... I hated that thing being full of messages when i went back to the car from my surfing sessions :)
....
... so it is low maintenance .... my only problem was that i did not find a waterproof one as i am kinda outdorsy and happen to submerge myself into rivers and other stuff with full gear and bike :)
.... as my server numbers grew to 5 and my business depends on it i'm on the search too now and they are my first target i think ...
:) YOU have to fix stuff immediately, nut just tell, hey i'm on a holiday, or it's my day off :( :)
all i needed (and probably what you need) is to be able to be able to send a mail to a forwarder that puts the lines on your pager
(eg sub:booboo happened on foo.bar.com, text:
worked fine
just be sure to enable it for countries you go (went to florida once with it, and asked the provider to enable it, and it just did not happen )
also they have traffic, and other news services, but be careful, it annoyed the hell outta me
they gave a tiny motorola pager that used 1 battery for 3 months
so try skytel.com
hey it sucks to be the tech of your own business
and call the other tech
Hey, thanks a lot for your comments all. It{s )sorry, I{m in La Paz, Mexico and I can{t figure out where half of the normal symbol keys on on this spanish keyboard, but I{ll pretend they are they in the right place (smile) ). Someone sent in a Python script for coupling a couple of different pager networks to provide coverage in the event of a failure of Iridium (pretty much the only game in town, as I feared. It{s great, I{ve been reading Slashdot since Chips and Dips and I{m constantly amazed at the wealth of knowledge within the community. I really hope to find a solution that will allow me to enjoy my life outside of work, and still have a job at the end of the weekend! Given it{s the year 2005, I{m hardly ever more than 2 hours from an internet connection; getting a paging solution together will be a great way to stay informed of service-outage and hopefully, I can get there and fix it before much business is lost. I{m actually a little suprised by some of the responses however. I had thought there would be a lot more 1-person shows out there, trying to be monetarily successful in their ventures; but sadly good deal of them appear to be paranoid freaks who, only occasionally look up from their cubicles to find out stuff is happening outside. In a futile effort to layout the truth.. I{ve been a shareware author for a number of years, trying to make a few bucks so I can quit my boring corp programming job and do something for myself. Luckily, I caught the end of the dotcom bubble, got some investment money and started a Shareware Payment Processing company for other shareware developers to use when selling their product. It{s worked well and we{ve even discovered how to leverage brand names and owned-websites (RocketDownload.com and Downoholic.com) to help sell other developer{s products. It{s been been a lot of fun and really challenging. I don{t do spamming, never have, never will, after all, haven{t most people gotten an anti-spamming solution that works well (question mark, can{t find it). smile. Who would try to make money like that anymore Anyways, sorry for the ramble. And thanks for the great advice!
There is a few other options and one is to just rent the pager when you need it. The pagers can be rented from wcc and the person to talk to is Erin Edick 800 211 2575. They will let you know if its cheeper to purchase or rent.
As you may know, Iridium pagers are no longer in production. They were one-way (incoming only) pagers. Supply is extremely limited. Infosat may have a limited quantity left in stock - www.infosat.com. Additionally, WCC may have a limited quantity in stock - www.wcclp.com. You may contact either of these Iridium Service Partners directly for additional information including package pricing. No pager replacement is planned however, Iridium Satellite will continue to support new and existing paging subscribers. Global voice, data and two-way SMS are features available via the 9505 and new 9505A portable handsets. The phones retail for approximately $1,500 USD through authorized Iridium Satellite Service Partners. A data kit including an adapter, phone stand and data software CD retails for approximately $200 USD. Cost per minute for both voice and data will be approximately $1.50 USD. You will have a choice of either post-paid or pre-paid service. Please let Iridium Satellite know if this would be a viable alternative and if you have additional questons at sales@iridium.com.