Maintenance modems and power failures

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1

Most network providers are aware of the secret hiding in most of our
POPs. Those little sporters and courier modems stuffed into a rack
somewhere plugged into the nearest available outlet, as the only
out-of-band access. Has anyone come up with a solution for powering
these forgotten pieces of equipment, which doesn't cost more than
the modem itself?

At first you might think it makes sense to power them off the UPS
which is powering the rest of your equipment. The only problem is
if you are using the maintenance modem to monitor your UPS. This
is just one of those things which has bugged me for a few years, but
I still haven't come up with a solution I really like.

  Get two modems.

POTS ---- Modem 0 ---- Modem 1
            > >
          UPS AC Utility AC

  This only really makes sense if you have your terminal server
w/ redundant power, one utility AC and the other UPS AC.

  Austin

2

Get two modems.

POTS ---- Modem 0 ---- Modem 1
           > >
         UPS AC Utility AC

This only really makes sense if you have your terminal server
w/ redundant power, one utility AC and the other UPS AC.

Actually, this will work better with two POTS lines, and two terminal
servers. I like two different types of terminal servers - a 25/26xx (the
26xx with 32 async ports is kewlio), and something like a Sentry remote
reboot device with async ports. Be sure one modem/terminal server combo is
plugged into the utility power and the other modem/terminal server combo is
plugged into the UPS. (You'd feel dumb if the terminal server was plugged
into the wall and the modem into the UPS. :slight_smile:

The obvious problem here is that it is much more expensive than the normal
OOB setup. But if you are going to have remote reboot equipment anyway,
getting a Sentry with the terminal server isn't that much more expensive
than the one without. This also gets you around stupid problems like IOS
bugs.

Now you just have to figure out which devices' console ports to plug into
which terminal server. :stuck_out_tongue:

Austin

TTFN,
patrick

I Am Not An Isp
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