Okay, braintrust, I got a question.
My paging system is dependent on my PBX being functional. My PBX being functional is dependent on VoIP being up. VoIP being up is dependent on there being power. And power is dependent on the UPS not being dead. Which I can depend on for about two hours, maybe three. But this is the Pacific Northwest and we've had longer outages before.
If I have a notification that power will go down, my wife can notify the clients she needs to and tell them to call her cell phone. If I've got a two hour window on that, I'm gravy. And what I was going to do is use a Synology Router because it runs DSM and I can totally get DSM to monitor the USB port on the back and go "whoopsidaisy here's an email" when the UPS says "power's off, yo." But then I decided that this particular router sucks as a router and sucks as a wifi device so I went with a Netgear Nighthawk instead. And that, as far as I can tell, isn't smart enough to take a UPS input and go "power be down, y'all."
So I can get little $150 chunks of shit that will call me, but they're sucking down an ATA port that I'd rather use for fax. I can buy a baby Diskstation to sit there and act as a Time Machine target but they're like $400 with disks. I can probably buy a Stick PC and trigger it to do something clever but I figure there's people here who are way better at networking than I am and there must be some clever way to, say, ping my VPN or something and see if my canary is dead, for example. Whatever that canary might be.
So how would you do it? You've got a live network for two hours, and you need to send out a notification (email, mms or phone is fine) when the power kicks.
How do you do it?
Then grab one of these along with it.Well I was going cyberpower but the UPS hasn't been spec'd yet. I'm all ears.
You know what it is? I've never bought a UPS with an accessory slot, and I somehow didn't think what I was looking for had one. But I can totally use that. Just to brag: I have successfully configured a system that allows me to text a patient's voice recording assigned via schedule for up to two hours even with the mutherfucking power off, and with Google Fi I'll have that signal available across three cellular networks and wifi. I appear to have successfully built a paging system more robust than the actual paging network we had down in LA. It's gonna be slicker than snail snot, and my out-of-pocket is going to be about $3k including all cabling and networking hardware. And that includes five extensions, four cordless phones and sixteen lines.
Awesome. I use a google voice number as an emergency pager that rings to email from my network monitor box. Knowing shit hit the fan before the end users can call is wonderful. That.... that gives me a fuck ton of ideas. Fi is $20/month for me, wifi data is free. Hmmmmmm....I have successfully configured a system that allows me to text a patient's voice recording assigned via schedule for up to two hours even with the mutherfucking power off, and with Google Fi I'll have that signal available across three cellular networks and wifi.
So I've already tested the texting features of Fi and they work great. Problem being right now Voice gives you voice-to-text and doing it my way doesn't, because the Synapse system just records a 128k WAV file and throws it into SMTP. There must be some clever way to autoload that attachment and VTT it but that's a little beyond my ability to fuck with at the moment. And I know it's got the coverage of Sprint and T-Mobile and US Cellular and whatever wifi it's got the passwords to. But considering this is a roll-my-own solution, I'm still scared.
Fi works out in BFE deep woods Kentucky and out in the middle of Dumbfuckistan Ohio. I can get a 3G almost everywhere, and I am not in major cities except when at work. The wifi will connect to open access ports, then create a VPN to google for your "cell" service. I'm very happy with it so far; my highest bill has been $35/month. the one warning I have for people is that if you have a Google Voice number and port a new number over to Fi, you need to take your Voice number to a whole new Gmail/Google account or you lose it. https://support.google.com/a/answer/2364580?hl=en Looks like your answer is in that somewhere. I'm digging through as well.