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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?"
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.
- 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.
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.
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
Iridium + Text messaging (http://messaging.iridium.com/) is the way to go. That way you can not only receive it anywhere, but you can take action.
The one thing I did notice with the Iridium phones is that while they work EVERYWHERE on the globe (including in the middle of the Pacific on a cruise ship, great reception despite the latency), they don't perform as well as most modern phones in steel buildings (again, cruise ship). On the deck they were great. In the large open air suites they were great. In the casino and restaurants, not so great.
Above and beyond that, find a great managed hosting solution and make a deal with them to respond to alerts during periods of absence. I know my hosting company does this with our application servers from time to time.
Hope that helps.
Video Phone Blogs send video messages straight to the web.
Good call.
That would explain the reference to "it's [sic] automated delivery systems" in the question.
Oh the irony, a spammer asking slashdot for help, and getting it before someone spots the obvious.
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.
<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
What would be even better is someone in a similar position who found some solution that's better than a satellite pager, which never occurred to the O.P. Web searches just don't work when you don't understand your problem well enough to reduce it to a few keywords.
The 'net is a great source of information, but I have learned over time I can often get richer, more personalized information by talking to co-workers and friends, especially if it's a topic of general interest. For a specialist topic like this one, a personal exchange with an expert on usenet or slashdot can be very valuable.
Web ads, IMHO, are at the bottom of the heap as information sources (along with TV and radio ads).
Hiring you might be deemed funny but this seems to be the correct answer.
I fail to see how, while hiking in the back country, finding out via a pager that there is an issue will help. Not be able to 'call out' with solutions....hey, he's not asking for Satellite phone info.....but Satellite pager info. Knowing that somethings is amiss leads to two results.
1), Hurredly unhiking out of the back country until you reach a location where you can 'call out' and/or solve the issue.
2), Stressing about what the outcome of the issue is while you continue to enjoy your hike.
Neither seem worthwhile to me unless you are the "only person" who can do this job and you trust no one else in your company or employ to handle the task. You really should have someone who can.
Just an opinion, but if you can't find any information using google, and everyone else can, you don't deserve a pager :-)
Neither seem worthwhile to me unless you are the "only person" who can do this job and you trust no one else in your company or employ to handle the task.
Woe to the company that hires a single-man operation to maintain mission-critical systems.
If he's the only person who can manage these 7 servers, and gets hit by a bus, a whole lot of people are going to be really pissed off.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
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
Calling Iridium profitable is a very interesting use of the word profitable.
It's the same definition of profitability used elsewhere: to first order, the company's revenues exceed their expenses. (Since the company is not public, it is not required to publicly report the magnitude of those profits, so we have to take the company at its word about its status.) It should be noted that the company in question here is Iridium Satellite LLC, which is not the same as Iridium LLC, the company that went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 1999 after going billions of dollars into debt deploying the system. Iridium Satellite LLC was formed by a group of investors who spent on the order of $25-50 million to purchase the assets of Iridium LLC--including the satellite constellation--and operate them as a new company. It's a bit of a technicality, but it's the nature of capitalism that new companies are often formed out of the ashes of failed ones.
Such skepticism is certainly not unwarranted. However, the probability that Iridium will be able to deploy replacement satellites next decade as the existing satellites fail will depend on a number of factors, including but not limited to: market viability, entrance of new competitors (satellite or terrestrial) into those markets, company cash flow and profitability, the ability to obtain outside financing (investments, loans, etc.), satellite manufacturing costs, satellite launch costs, health of the existing constellation, and deployment schedule requirements. To conclude that that the odds of Iridium deploying a replacement system are "extremely close to zero" implies that you have evaluated these and other factors. Care to share the details of your assessment?
Original post:
"I own a dot-com..."
Presumably if the owner gets hit by a bus, a lot of WTF? is going to go down. I assume he's mission critical because, for all we know, it's him and maybe 2 other people working for the company. I've been there, you really can't have redundancies when it's just less than 10 of you trying to make this company work.
It's a strange world -- let's keep it that way