A little background,
I work for a small Private school as the IT manager, 90% of the Staff, Faculty & Students live on campus (as did my predecessor). Formally when there was problem He was onsite to address it or a 3rd party company was called in to assist. I however live 45mins away on a good day. In an effort to save the school money I have been assuming many of the responsibilities that were intially taken care of by outside vendors. I have been setting up remote access to the Network equipment on the campus and have also deployed a few ethernet based power strips that allow me to login to the campus from home and turn on / off network equipment if they require a reset.
The school typically closes from Christams - New years So I was looking forward to a week off, Unfortunatly On Dec 22 the friday before Xmas week we had a power outage.... At 9 am an email went out from the Headmaster that the school could close at Noon, at 9:30am the power went out.
As we have UPS's installed on all the server equipment I decided to wait as long as I could before shutting down the servers (power problems plague this area). But when I decided shut down the servers the UPS units had already done so. I waited till 2:30pm (in the hopes the power would be restored and I wouldn't have come back till after my vacation)
No luck... I decided to go back to the campus the next day, I called up the local Internet Service Provider to verify that service was restored prior to leaving and found out it had, I logged into the Servers remotely and verified they were up. However I was concerned that the Throughwall AC unit installed in the room was off and did not want to chance the Servers and Phone system overheating and burning out. Luckily I found a campus resident who could verify it was still up.
The goal:
I want to setup an ethernet based outlet for the AC unit so I can monitor and reset it if necessary, I need to do this as Simply and for lack of a better word "cheaply" as possible, hard wirering is not an option.
I've looked at some of the Home Automation sites but want to avoid calling with this simple problem and have a guy try to sell me a full blown system.
Can anyone point me at a few components that would fit my needs, thanks
I work for a small Private school as the IT manager, 90% of the Staff, Faculty & Students live on campus (as did my predecessor). Formally when there was problem He was onsite to address it or a 3rd party company was called in to assist. I however live 45mins away on a good day. In an effort to save the school money I have been assuming many of the responsibilities that were intially taken care of by outside vendors. I have been setting up remote access to the Network equipment on the campus and have also deployed a few ethernet based power strips that allow me to login to the campus from home and turn on / off network equipment if they require a reset.
The school typically closes from Christams - New years So I was looking forward to a week off, Unfortunatly On Dec 22 the friday before Xmas week we had a power outage.... At 9 am an email went out from the Headmaster that the school could close at Noon, at 9:30am the power went out.
As we have UPS's installed on all the server equipment I decided to wait as long as I could before shutting down the servers (power problems plague this area). But when I decided shut down the servers the UPS units had already done so. I waited till 2:30pm (in the hopes the power would be restored and I wouldn't have come back till after my vacation)
No luck... I decided to go back to the campus the next day, I called up the local Internet Service Provider to verify that service was restored prior to leaving and found out it had, I logged into the Servers remotely and verified they were up. However I was concerned that the Throughwall AC unit installed in the room was off and did not want to chance the Servers and Phone system overheating and burning out. Luckily I found a campus resident who could verify it was still up.
The goal:
I want to setup an ethernet based outlet for the AC unit so I can monitor and reset it if necessary, I need to do this as Simply and for lack of a better word "cheaply" as possible, hard wirering is not an option.
I've looked at some of the Home Automation sites but want to avoid calling with this simple problem and have a guy try to sell me a full blown system.
Can anyone point me at a few components that would fit my needs, thanks
