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?"

Comments

Holy cow.

[Kozz]

Owner of a dot-com, seven servers, and you're the only person with the technical skills? I'd say your options are:

• 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.

Re:Holy cow.

[pla]

Owner of a dot-com, seven servers, and you're the only person with the technical skills? I'd say your options are: * Never leave town. * Delegate some responsibilities to someone else.

I'd agree with you, but for an entirely different reason than he "should" for his own good...

This strikes me as a simple matter of practicality. I personally enjoy hiking. I hike places where I can't get a cell signal. In such places, even if I could get a signal, what good would it do me? With up to six hours to get back to town, would knowing my servers just cooked really do me any good if I didn't have someone "back at the ranch" to fix the problem for me in the first place?

Someone either needs near-perfect uptime, or they don't. If "ASAP" means five minutes or less, the job requires a body, not a pager. If it means the company's sole tech can afford a few hours to get back to civilization, then skip the pager and have fun while out, rather than spending the whole time worrying about getting a page.

Priorities

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Weak Link

[Doc Ruby]

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.

Re:Are you a SPAMMER?!

[kiore]

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.

Support Contracts, or simplify

[SpamapS]

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.

Re:or he can...

[Mistlefoot]

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.

Re:or he can...

[Nutria]

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.

Ultra mission critical and no watchdogged spares?

[Qbertino]

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.