Site monitoring

Yesterday, I noticed that one of my TiVo boxes were not successfully
making calls on my Vonage phone line, so I decided to switch the phone
cable to the jack that has our second phone line (the one with the
DSL). I then went to work. I got a call from my wife
stating that our Vonage phone line was not working. When I looked
into it, I noticed that our dsl was down.

I was able to fix the problem, just by switching the phone cable back
to the Vonage phone line (I could have also just added a DSL
filter). But this made me want to find a way to at least be
notified when our dsl is down.


I found a web site that provides a free site monitoring service. It is
called SiteUptime.com, and their free service looks pretty good. Their
free services will let you monitor three of the combinations of
monitored host, monitored port, and monitoring location, every 30
minutes For example, I have it monitoring the http port on a server
connected through our DSL, and the smtp and http ports on an external
server.

You can also upgrade to have this include more features, including a more frequent checking interval.