Sub $20 outagesio monitor

[OutagesIO_Support]

We look forward to your findings.

At one point, we were testing these little $8.00 3G/4G mini routers which were working very well.

However, finding the real hardware became impossible as Chinese clones started flooding the market.

Now they are worthless. You'll notice on eaby and other places that Chinese sellers never show the rear label and when you ask about it, they pretty much always say they don't understand the question.

[peachy]

I'm thinking the device I linked above could serve as a pi hole too, just want to nerd out to be honest 8-)

[OutagesIO_Support]

That's a nice little device.

Wireless, GPIO ports, quad core, runs linux AND comes in a case.

Makes you wonder how small these things are going to get. I believe I saw a coin sized linux device a while back.

Other than building a version of the agent on Pi, we've not used any Raspberry hardware to date.

[peachy]

Coin sized linux device: https://shelly.cloud/shelly1-open-source/

I actually have a bunch of these I haven't installed yet, I'll have a poke around in the OS at some point and see if outages could run on it.

You could monitor your internet connection from every lightswitch :)

[OutagesIO_Support]

We've been trying to find a sub $10.00 device we could give away here and there.

If the devices are only running otm, they would use less data. Our hardware agents use more data because they are doing more things.

I'd be interested in knowing if otm will run on those coin sized devices. They aren't sub $10.00 but interesting devices. I see they are wifi but I didn't see how you set it up or maybe even ssh into it.

Our linux version was built on Centos 7.6.1810.

[OutagesIO_Support]

Hi again,

Did you get the chance to try OTM on the Shelly device? Very curious to know if it would run.

[peachy]

Not yet Alex, I bought 10 of them on a "deal of the day" offer when my missus explicitly told m not to buy them. I now have to wait for an opportunity to covertly install them when she is not around :lol:

[OutagesIO_Support]

We are anxious to find out.

I believe we also have the question 'can we do a BSD version' on the table also.

[peachy]

BSD version I'm able to test if you have something

[OutagesIO_Support]

I meant it's on the table as a topic to see if we can add it. We don't have it yet.

[peachy]

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So it arrived, it's tiny, put here next to a mouse for perspective.

I did the following
* Downloaded armbian from here [](https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-zero/)[https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-zero/](https://www.armbian.com/orange-pi-zero/)
* Flashed armbian to the sd card using etcher [](https://www.balena.io/etcher/)[https://www.balena.io/etcher/](https://www.balena.io/etcher/) and put card in Orange Pi
* Plugged network cable into switch and Orange pi
* Plugged usb cable into micro usb port, this device is quite low power so no special usb power block needed
* Went to my router to see what IP address the Pi had been assigned
* sshed to root@ using password 1234
* Went through the password change you are prompted to do first time
* apt update to update repos then apt upgrade to update all software
* mkdir /opt
* created new outages agent in the control panel type Raspberry Pi 3B+ and downloaded the agent
* copied agent to Orange Pi scp otm_1.58.2002_arm root@<ip address="">:/otm</ip>
* created /etc/agentid per instructions on agent page
* made agent executable chmod 755 /opt/otm_1.58.2002_arm
* ran agent with /otm/otm_1.58.2002_arm &

So it's now running a treat via the wired interface. I also have it connected to wireless so could monitor as a wireless client if i wanted to.

How to connect to wireless?

[Mike]

Hi,

Thanks so much for the great tutorial. We would be happy to add the Orange device to our list if you feel it seems pretty reliable so far.

I don't think we have any special installation notes for the Pi devices like we do for the Linux version.

Do you mind if I turn this information into a post? Either a post on the web site or a link to your post here.

Any luck with that Shelly? That's one of the devices we're all curious to find out about.

Mike

[peachy]

let's see how it runs for a week.

I'd say the cheaper device with 256mb memory would also run fine if you only want to run outagesio on it, the os and outages is currently using less than 90mb.

One limitation on this device is the 100mb network card, the agent is consistently hitting this limit in it's speed tests. Personally I don't think this matters, I'm more interested in degradation in general or at specific points of the day, but it may be important to others.

I would strongly recommend that anybody that buys one of these gets it from the same store i bought from, Aliexpress can be a minefield of copies of copies.

The Shelly is going to be a bit more work, because i don't have experience with Mongoose OS or Tasmota, i will get round to it soon.

[Mike]

Sure, lets give it some test time. Once you confirm all looks good, we could add it into the ARM list.

We would like to get to a point where we aren't fully saturating the link and only looking for low bandwidth. Full saturation testing is fine if you're looking for top speed but if you mainly want to know that you have usable bandwidth, since you know it is usually a shared service anyhow, that seems more Internet friendly.

We do have something that lets you limit the speed of the test that we were working on but it is not in the dashboard.

We recently added a low bandwidth test for our business customers which specifically does not saturate the link but instead, does a short, low data test to get some idea of usable bandwidth. Members can set a low bandwidth threshold to receive notifications if bandwidth falls below a certain level.

For example, say you are monitoring a 50Mbps connection and you know you're ok down to maybe 5Mbps. You could set the alert to 5Mbps and if it dips below that, it would send you an alert.

You may have noticed that the agents list, dashboard and other things are slowly changing. This is because of a big code unification project we have going on in the background. I'll be posting about it shortly.

Mike

[peachy]

Quick update:

• My kitchen lights work again therefore my missus hasn't kicked me out on the street

• I haven't electrocuted myself again

• I found and ordered a $3 device with the same chipset as the Shelly to try to run outagesio on. Don't think it's arm so we might need to jointly geek out to get this working

[OutagesIO_Support]

Unfortunately, we don't have a developer that works on the agent full time. Agent changes are the slowest part of everything that we offer.

Mainly because we never intended to support a large number of OS's, just a couple because developing and maintaining agents on top of everything else is a lot of work load. However, we do recognize the value of offering many different variations and that will come when we see some critical mass in terms of members and usage. We're not there yet, not enough word of mouth.

We'll do what we can once you know a little more. BSD has been brought up but I do not have an estimated time on this. I believe it would be freebsd if we did it as it is the most widely used.