Query : seeking a (low cost & secure) turnkey plug-and-play appliance to report network outages

Sat Nov 19 21:50:07 UTC 2011

On Thu, Nov 17, 2011 at 6:58 AM, A. Chase Turner <chase at stumpy.com> wrote:
> I am seeking a $100 turnkey micro hardware appliance to plug into a LAN hub (behind a consumer-level cable modem) whose only purpose in life is to send heartbeat (and simple quality of service metrics) to a pre-configured central aggregation service on the WAN.
> Key requirement is the micro hardware appliance will be installed by non-technical elderly end-users -- so, it must
[snip]
I think your expectation of finding an off-the-shelf turnkey unit that
will do such a specialized thing for  $100 or less  with no extra
work, is a bit unreasonable.  Your requirement is such a niche
requirement,  that there is little demand for such a unit,  meaning
you won't find a mass produced hardware component out of a box
specifically designed to do that specific thing at optimal cost,   and
general purpose miniature embedded computer boards are cheaper.

Although you get the work of building the firmware components to make
it do what you intend.

Companies that build products for such a niche market need a decent
margin for each unit sold,  to compensate for low volume.

I would say look at something like a  Soekris net4501   or other
low-cost mini computer board,  that you can load a flash card on  and
install BSD on;    I think  approximately  $90 for board + case,  then
you need to factor in cost of other components such as flash memory.

>From there you need to build the configuration GUI,  write some
scripts, and build an image to load on your customized  general
purpose computing devices.

Your end user doesn't need to do all that extra work of scripting or
copying data to the unit as long as you provide the pre-assembled unit
with your prepared image

--
-JH