hotelwifi

I'm working up a proposal for WiFi at a hotel.

They require "Proactive remote monitoring"...as opposed to us just waiting for the hotel to call us that something is wrong. The hotel may not even know something is wrong, right away.

But the Internet gateways on the market (including the standard of the Industry...the Nomadix) don't have fault monitoring of the WiFi system, built into them to tell when a failure occured in the WiFi system. That would make the expensive Nomadix, even more expensive...plus the other Internet gateways like the DLink and ZyXel units even more expensive.

I guess we could remote monitor a WiFi system by just "pinging" the APs once or twice a day and figure the system is working ok, if the ping works. Does that sound valid? That would be a real inexpensive way to proactively monitor things. It's just not full time monitoring.

But on the more expensive end of the spectrum, I hear there is equipment that can be used to real time monitor a WiFi system and let me know the moment something fails? Is that the Air Path I have heard about? Seems like something like this would run up a WiFi proposal up hundreds or thousands of dollars due to the extra wiring, equipment, and labor for installation of just the monitoring devices.

But in order to meet the "Proactive remote Monitoring" that the company wants to be put in place, I figure there must be some kind of "cost effective" method of remote monitoring a WiFi installation without having to spend thousands of dollars...or even hundreds of dollars.

I'm really wondering if there is a way to do it cost effectively. Cause none of the WiFi systems have fault notifications built into them so as to notify the technical support provider.

Any info in this area will be much appreciated.

hydro27405

The fool at the counter can monitor live.....LOL
I use StarOS join the forum over there and search untill you just don't want to know anymore.
P.S. you can run StarOS as a standalone server and it rocks.
Hydro

lill

You can install a standard AP that allows ping and a Wireless Ethernet adapter that are running over the WiFi and this unit as a IP that you can ping...

So...

If the AP answer's to ping everything ok from Internet to the AP and if the Ethernet adpater answers even the WiFi part is ok...

And you should use a monitor software to monitor it every 5 minute or so...
there a lot of these around...

A big systemfor that is NetCrunch from Adremsoft (www.adremsoft.com) they also have SMS notification... as a alert action...

wrzwaldo

I also like http://www.ipswitch.com/products/whatsup/

renderman

A WRT54G setup with the Kismet Drone reporting back to the home station would be able to tell you if any of the AP's in range stopped transmitting might be an alternative. If everything is on the same channel, then it's very easy to see when the ssid broadcast 'heartbeat' has stopped. Also good for seeing if anyone is trying anything sneaky.

Suggest turning off packet capture though, gets rid of any privacy issues, unless you make packet gathering for maintinence purposes part of your TOS.

Just a thought.

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Madhadder

OR

You can buy and install REAL Enterprise class Equipment and use a NMS
system... That way you can monitor everything via SNMP/Telnet/SSH Etc.

I would go for the Aironet 1200 series to do a hotel.

Here are some of the better NMS setups (Sorted by Price)
1. HP Openview
2. Cisco Works
3. Solarwinds Orion 7.0
4. Whatup Gold 8

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wrzwaldo

See post #4.

Madhadder

WUG is the bottom of the barrel.....

Solarwinds Orion is much better. It's avail in 3-4 versions depending on
how many nodes you need to monitor.

You can checkout the lived demo over at Solarwinds.net

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hotelwifi

I thank you all so much for your input. I got busy and wasn't able to check this out til tonight.

I will check this stuff out.

I needed a cost effective way to figure if the APs at the hotels were working from my office.

I did find out though that the gateway we use will ping the APs all the time, and if they stop pinging, an alert email message will be sent to me.

But I still need to ping the gateway remotely, to be sure that is working.

I hope there is a cost effective pinging program that will ping all our gateways continuously, from our office, and will send an alarm if the pinging stops.

sandy99

www.castlerock.com is very good-free 30 day trial as well. SNMP as well as Ping based

Stew

dunforgiven

check out NAGIOS. This is all you'll ever need

streaker69

Quick break out the torches and chainsaws, a thread has risen from the dead.

http://www.angelfire.com/mn/masterca...kenstein23.jpg

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grcore

I have a better idea: http://www.earthstation1.com/MovieWavFiles/news47.wav

rotinom

Bigbrother is also a viable open-source option *runs away from chainsaws*

wifi-soft

Not sure whether you implemented this solution, however, if you still need a good, cost-effective network monitoring solution, then we (http://www.wifi-soft.com) can offer one for you. It uses variety of monitoring methods like ICMP, SNMP, HTTP, telnet to determine the status of each an every access point installed at a location. Email/SMS notifications are sent whenever any access point goes down, so the maintenance staff can react quickly and resolve the problem before it starts affecting the customers.

The solution is time tested and is currently monitoring over 200 hotspots distributed across the world.