[rescue] Auction treasure

[Gavin Hubbard]

Hi Lads

I just got back from a local auction. It was a typical 1300+ lot PC
clearance (the type where they plow through every lot in under three hours)
so there wasn't much good stuff. However I did manage to score some little
treasures for the home & office networks.

For some reason they had a bunch of new in box Western Telematics stuff.
I've never seen their products before but they seem pretty good quality. I
scored an 8 port network power switch (lets you can telnet or dial-in and
switch eight power circuits independently), an 8 port serial console (which
uses RJ11 plugs for the serial ports - WTF were they thinking!?), and a
33.6k rack modem.

I also scored an as-new 8-port Apex Outlook EL-80DT KVM switch, new-in-box
Avocent 4-port Enterprise KVM (really just a rebranded Apex EL-40DT), four
new-in-box Apex EL-11KM serial-PS2 convertors (allows systems with serial
mice to connect to a PS/2 KVM), and a new-in-box Cybex Longview (drives a
KVM signal up to 150 metres over a single UTP cable).

Total damage for the evening was only $146 USD :-)

I'm especially looking foward to using the network power switch. One of my
clients has a Cisco 827 ADSL router that drops the DSL connection
approximately every four weeks or so for no discernable reason. I'd love to
be able to save myself a trip out there to push the power button every
month. I wonder if I an still charge tham an incident fee for resetting the
router remotely :-)

The other thing I really want to play with is the Longview console
extender. If it works reasonablly well, I may end up with a nice Zen office
(all computers banished to the server room).

Regards,

Gavin