How can I know ASAP when my PC loses Internet connectivity and I'm away from the PC?

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I have a PC with a USB humidity logger, that measures humidity in our factory. When the humidity is too high, the PC sends me an email alerting me to the problem.

Sometimes the internet goes down, or there's a power failure.
Then, my PC can't email me.
I need a way to know ASAP when the PC loses internet connectivity.

One idea, is if there was a server somewhere, and my PC could ping it every 3 mins. If the server doesn't receive a ping after 10 minutes, the server can email me.

How do I solve this problem?

Richard Woolf

Posted 2016-07-30T05:32:29.823

Reputation: 111

Question was closed 2016-07-30T06:43:29.117

1You're idea is you're answer. The real question is where do you host the off-site server? There are tons of options from DIY to hosted solutions. If you have a land-line near the computer you could potentially have a modem/fax type setup since land-lines usually stay hot even though power goes out. There's other monitoring services as well, but really a question of time/money/effort. – txtechhelp – 2016-07-30T05:39:51.027

Thanks. I do have a hosted server somewhere, but surely there must be some kind of pre-existing software solution to this problem. I've heard of services that ping a website server for you every x mins to see if it's live, but here we would want to ping a PC on the network, which is not acting a "server" in any way - I guess I could open a special port on it or something and do port-forwarding on the router to the PC, and that way the PC may be able to respond to the ping requests. I'd also need to get a static IP address. This is a lot of effort where I'm not sure I would even succeed. – Richard Woolf – 2016-07-30T05:52:04.313

Rather than posting the exact same question you should be editing your original question and then waiting for it to be reopened. At this moment your original question has 4 reopen votes meaning that people believe it has merit. If you can improve it then feel free, but posting a duplicate question is not allowed. – Mokubai – 2016-07-30T06:45:43.913

Answers

2

There's a few tools that might work, while not explicitly desgined to do so.

The simplest/oldschool way to do this is to have some flavour of chat account - say xmpp. If the account is disconnected, you know that the server is down. You might even be able to script it with an appropriate tool to send you system information periodically

Likewise a bitorrent sync share would drop out and you'd be able to see it. No server or account needed. You might even use this to download the updated humidity output.

Journeyman Geek

Posted 2016-07-30T05:32:29.823

Reputation: 119 122

OpenFire is an opensource, excellent XMPP server adaptable to work environments. And it's free. =) https://www.igniterealtime.org/projects/openfire/

– Anaksunaman – 2016-07-31T06:57:48.403

For a single or a few clients I'd go with prosody. Matrix as a protocol also seems designed for this sorta thing. For that matter a slack or hipchat session may work. – Journeyman Geek – 2016-07-31T09:03:55.207

Asked: 2016-07-30T05:32:29.823

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Active: 2016-07-30T06:00:00.007