Initially, I was going to do a report on an email conversation that Chris and I had today. Considering a time crunch is in affect for the day, it’ll have to wait until tomorrow. Moving on.
Today my mom calls me with a bit of urgency regarding their bookstore. It seems that their Internet had gone belly up and the lights to the router in use were all off. Thankfully, we had the foresight to use a service called Sputnik ahead of time. Being as I am over 250 miles away and it would take half the day to do anything for them in person.
Because we have the standard, full service with a robust remote control panel based on Sputnik servers, I was able to get right to work. Right away, I was able to see which machines had tried to access the ‘Net and how they were still stuck in DHCP release status. I was also able to see that the router (Sputnik provided) was showing me that it was showing up as live. To test this, I pinged the router – success. Unfortunately, lights were still off and there was no Internet connection in sight.
Then I enabled one of my favorite features that the control panel provides me – reboot. I was able to remotely reboot the router and within a short time, it showed up as live again in my own display. Shortly after this, I learned that the lights on the router were back and the Internet was back in business. Now there were still a few wireless users stuck in DHCP renewal limbo. I remotely disconnected them from the simple UI and they were then free to login in to the portal login page once again.
I’ve said it once and I will say it again, Sputnik is the best solution for this type of thing out there – period. And as those who remember me talking about these guys once before may remember, the entire system is running on Linux. Then again, so do most of the PCs in that bookstore as well. How often do I have repair issues because of this? Never. I run a customer use PC using a Live Kiosk CD, another PC that was once running Xandros Linux (hardware failure meant I had to switch it out) and I am looking at putting Ubuntu onto the store notebook on my next trip up. Yes, Linux does in fact work in the real world when the people supporting it are planning ahead for general users.
[tags]Linux, Kiosk PC, wireless[/tags]