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I have a remote server with no physical attendance 24x7. But sometimes I have faced a downtime due to either network related issues or power outages.

But because I am sitting afar from my server I am unable to determine at the time of downtime whether it is a loss of processing time due to power outage or is it a network related disconnection. As a result in both the cases I simply can't do SSH into my server.

It is only after several hours when the server reconnects or reboots do I get to know what went wrong.

Is there a way I can figure out what type of downtime I am facing? For instance there could be an application that sends me an SMS alert in case of network downtime. But still it would need internet I guess to work..

Any suggestions would help on this.

user3271961
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1 Answers1

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If you're hosting critical things on a remote server then you should take care to get one with some sort of out-of-band management. This typically takes the form of a baseboard management controller which is effectively a separate computer inside your server which you can connect to by web and maybe SSH.

They also these days usually support industry-standard IPMI which has an open source client implementation called openipmi.

By this means you would be able to connect to the management console and see what the power and network status of the machine is even when the server is powered off.

However, all this can do is allow you to diagnose problems with your specific server. If there were some wider outage like all of the power outlets for the whole rack are dead then not even the OOB management service would be running and there is no way to tell what the extent of the outage would be. Your server would have no network because all the network devices it uses would also be powered off.

Similarly if there is some network issue that affects both your server and its management ports then you won't be able to tell the extent of it

Ultimately for concerns outside your server you rely on your hosting provider to tell you what is going on. If that's not happening then you need a better hosting provider.

grifferz
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