iw2oaz wrote: > > > Hi! > Has anyone build something for check the gateways status via Web? For > example I need to check the follow status: > > Main Line Voltage or only presence; > Temperature; > SWR or antenna short or broken; > UPS intervention; > > and put all in a Web page accessible only for the Sys Admin. Is this > possible? Some suggestion about?
There are ways to do all of the above, but you may wish to think about which ones will really cause outages often, and which ones will rarely happen before proceeding with adding all of those monitoring points. Line Voltage/Presence - There are environmental monitoring devices that are accessible via TCP/IP available. Many groups are mixing this "monitoring requirement" with the desire to remotely control power, and some of the APC and other devices out there both provide a web page for turning power on/off as well as power and temperature monitoring, which may help you with your temperature issue as well. Temperature - Where are you trying to measure? Temperature of the room? Temperature of the air coming out of the fan at the back of the RF modules? Temperature of the PA heatsink? All are quite different, and would be for remotely troubleshooting different things. SWR/Antenna - Bird and others make inline wattmeters that have voltage outputs, but if you're using commercial grade antenna components on your repeater, it has been shown that antenna systems rarely fail. UPS: There are daemons that can be run on Linux that will monitor certain brands of UPS if the UPS has such a feature built in. Some of the manufacturers of UPS systems provide their own Linux drivers, others publish their standards, and the community has built software. As someone else already mentioned, a commonly used software tool for monitoring systems is called Nagios. Integrating it into everything above would be a challenge, but a capable Linux admin who's used Nagios before in a commercial environment could get it done quickly -- a non-experienced person could get it done more slowly, with trial and error. Careful planning of how to add Nagios is needed so as to not cause problems with the webserver, since Apache/Tomcat is already used by the Icom software. Apache can be configured to handle multiple websites, etc... but again -- it takes an experienced person to do it or a tenacious one. Keep in mind that monitoring systems also need some "care and feeding" over time, and if your admin's time is short, adding more complexity doesn't really help to fix most of the above items -- someone still has to go to the site to repair all of those things. It's nice to know in advance what failed, but it doesn't assist at all in the actual repair process. If the ultimate goal is keeping the system on the air, the only way that happens is having responsive people willing to go to the site at a moment's notice. This is difficult for hobbyists, but many groups have people willing and committed to that level of support. Having someone at the site fixing the problem is far more important than being able to look at a screen and being able to tell what's wrong. Nate WY0X
