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One-man WISP & Vacation ? |
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Written by Airplane777
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Tuesday, 03 October 2006 |
"This may be a dumb question, but I will be basically a one-man WISP. I know there are some others here that bascially are one-man WISP operations.
How do you guys take vacations, trips, and go away with the wife and kids? Seems that with being a one-man operation, you are pretty much tied down to your WISP.
I'll soon be in this boat myself. I may be able to have someone from my son's networking business help out, but they mainly are network integration people, working mainly with wired systems. Plus they are so busy with their work, they may not have time to help out if I go on vacation.
So, I'm wondering how your (who don't have partners) handle this.
I'm starting to think I need a partner to help out during vacations, sickness, and PTP site surveys, etc. I'm going to have to get my wife to help out on a PTP site survey. I'm thinking that I may not be able to do a real good job if I want to go on vacation or when I need an extra hand to help me when I'm working on top of a building doing site surveys.
Thanks for any info."
Bigpaddy_Irl:
The only problem I really have is nodes stop responding after a long time. There is never a problem with a customers on their side. All my nodes have gsm rebooters, so every few hours or so I just log in with my laptop and 3g card into wiana, check the box's and if any of them are not responding just send the gsm rebooter a text to trip the power, and Bob's your uncle off they go again!! If God forbid anything did happen on the customers side, they just may wait for me to get back, but like I said, I have never had this problem as of yet.
polk5:
Find someone in the computer business that would be willing to be your hands for a couple of days if needed. Your network should be setup to where you can remote in and troublshoot from the outside. Then call him if needed. I have someone that I can call if an emergency occurs. If you build a good network then it should not fall apart every week. If you build it with good gear and redundancy you probably will not have to make that call to him.
mrbueno:
Let 12 years of experience tell you, you can't. You really need to hire someone to do the most minimum stuff while you are gone. Even then you may want to get every remote device possible. When I was one man, I could get away for maybe three days like Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, but that's about it.
I did just get back from two weeks of travel in Austria and the Czech Republic.
Recommendations:
IP-KVM - Something like this can be found around $500 »www.42u.com/raritan-kx101.htm These plug into your keyboard, video and mouse and allow control from bios on. Plug this into a cheap keyboard controlled regular KVM and you have a multi-unit KVM on the cheap
Remote Power Switch - »www.wti.com/ips8.htm What's the magic word when there is a problem and you don't know how to solve it? Reboot! I like my remote switches to have a serial port so I can dial-in and restart them. Which brings me to my next tool.
Serial terminal - For me, I happen to have portmaster 2's laying around. However, you can easily make a terminal server out of a linux machine »www.linux.org/docs/ldp/howto/Rem···tty.html If you go the extra mile, you can setup a ppp session and access your network and all the network connected devices even if your backbone router goes down.
Treo 650 - With this phone and these tools I can pretty much fix most things without remote hands.
Extra stuff:
Overly-modded UPS - My UPSs are monsters. Actually they are just monsters to move. Marine batteries plugged into standard cheapy UPSs. They take forever to charge, but imagine how great it is to have 17+ hours of power for your AC powered computer systems like billing and phone servers then 24+ hours for your WRAP or over 12 volt APs. That's security that let's you enjoy your vacation.
System Virtualization - I recently decided to virtualize my RADIUS and proxy servers under VMWare since it's free now. There is a working image of each on a CD at my office. They can be added to any VMWare server on my network. Any spare windows machine can be easily installed with VMWare and the zipped virutal machines extracted. Viola! Working systems in seconds. Now that I think of it, I should probably make a script on the CD that unzips and runs the virtual machines so that anyone can easily get my network back online.
Outsourced Level 1 Tech Support - "My interwebs don't go! FIX IT!" "Have you tried resetting your equipment?" "What's thats means?" Yep, we all have days like this. Hire a Level 1 Tech Support company and provide them with the basic knowledge of how to resolve your most common problems. If they can't do it, they can tell the customer, "We'll get right on that. Someone will contact you in the next few hours." Then it's up to you big guy.
Things I haven't tried but would like to:
Pager-based power switch - These sound cool, but are they? Anyone with a clue on this?
Now this is how I do it. I run an ISP and a Gaming Center so I have to have other people on staff now so that helps out. That doesn't always work out either.
Original thread location |
Business Operations