Recently in hardware Category

Recently I had some serious problems with wi-fi at home - especially one of the laptops was dropping off and couldn't come back. Quick survey using Kismet and other tools to scan what's flying around has proven that my network is in less populated part of the spectrum (at least here) but still, problems are getting worse and worse.

I was fully aware of Wi-Spy by Metageek, seen it in action previously but never had a chance to buy one. Part of the decision was the price back then, maybe now it would be another game, but anyway - I got myself another device, made by well known wi-fi vendor Ubiquiti and it's called AirView2.



What's so special about this one? Why it's better than Wi-Spy?

First of all I didn't say it's better. It's different, woks with Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, has a nice price tag and does pretty much the same as Wi-Spy. Let's have a closer look then, shall we?

Some time ago (rather long long time ago) we have decided to purchase some small device to turn it into very portable server, that we could send to one of our friends to host. The whole purpose was to get Nagios on it and to monitor our sites from outside of our networks. To some people it may sound crazy, but it makes kind of sense - how many times you have heard from someone "it works on my computer"? Too many times?

The goal is to know when my (and possibly why) visitors/customers can't reach my servers and to be able to diagnose if that is local to some location or network part or it affects wider audience. Up to some point remote sensor answers that question - at least from a perspective of his particular location.

After looking around the net we've decided to get one of those famous Soekris kits.


Was it a good choice as a hardware platform? How will it scale when the amount of monitored systems will reach certain level? Let's see where it got us so far as the system is live for about a year now.