Check Your Smoke Detectors during National Fire Prevention Month
Filed under: environmental monitoring, Security Monitoring, smoke detector
October is National Fire Prevention Month. This is a great opportunity to check all your current fire safety devices to keep your families, employees, and properties as safe as possible.
For traditional residential smoke detectors, the National Fire Protection Association recommends that you “change your battery when you change your clock” (twice yearly). They also recommend that you also test the smoke detectors monthly. Read more
Ravica Environmental Monitors Begin Where Mayberry Ends
Filed under: environmental monitoring, Intelligent Sensors, motion detector, SensorProbes, smoke detector, water leak monitoring
Growing up in a small town had some advantages, including a feeling of security. For example, when our family would leave town on vacation, the police department kept an eye on our home. Patrol cars drove by our house periodically, day and night, ensuring that our home and possessions were safe. In this way, it was if our small town was in the very capable hands of our own Andy Griffith. These days, law enforcement departments don’t necessarily have the resources to protect property this way.
Fortunately, we can have that sense of trust with a Ravica environmental sensor. Ravica security monitors placed in your property can alert you to the presence of property hazards like smoke and water. While you are away, you can still feel secure knowing you will be alerted to hazards as soon as they happen.
Environmental Monitoring Sensors: More Than Just Fancy Smoke Detectors
Filed under: environmental monitoring, humidity monitoring, SensorProbes, smoke detector, temperature monitoring, water leak monitoring
During a conversation this week, an associate of mine explained that his business is growing exponentially. His operation expanded from 5 locations to 18 locations in just 2 years. Considering the national economy during this last 2 years, I found this to be an astonishing and noble feat. But then he casually mentioned something else: one of his centers recently lost data due to a water leak. He mentioned it almost in passing, as if losses of this nature were to be occasionally expected.
Sadly, this type of water damage is fairly common. Not as common as the Old Spice Guy videos on YouTube, but common nonetheless. Read more
The benefits of a Ravica smoke detector
Filed under: environmental monitoring, General, SensorProbes, smoke detector
Everyone knows how important it is to keep facility smoke detectors in good working order. Smoke
detectors are a vital part of the life/safety plan in all residential and commercial buildings. In many situations a standard, battery-operated smoke detector is all you need. It’s reliable, it’s loud, and it gets the job done. However, in some situations the stand alone alarm might not be enough. If the smoke detector is located in an area that is not regularly occupied, like a storage warehouse, there might not be anyone around to hear that loud alarm. Or, what if the emergency occurs after business hours? It is the proverbial tree falling in the forest, but in the case of a fire, the damage will ring loud and clear, even if no one was around to hear the initial alarm. For these kinds of situations, a smoke alarm that ties into a web-based environmental monitoring system is a smart idea.
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What you can do about Christmas tree fire hazards
Filed under: Security Monitoring, smoke detector, temperature monitoring
The holiday season is finally upon us. As usual, with the cold weather comes turkey dinner and Black Friday sales - but that’s not all! If your family is anything like mine, the first thing you do after properly digesting your stuffing and waking from your Tryptophan coma is put up that glorious Christmas tree. There is really no better indication of the impending holiday season than a well lit and beautifully decorated tree.
I am a fan of the good ol’ fashion fake tree. Nothing says Happy Holiday’s like the smell of, well… plastic. But as I understand it, there are some 33 million American homes that go the natural route with their tree selection. However, improperly hydrated Christmas trees can pose a very real safety concern. According to the U.S. Fire Administration, “Christmas trees account for 200 fires annually, resulting in 6 deaths, 25 injuries and more than $6 million in property damage.”
Mount Wilson Observatory In Danger From L.A. Fire
I just read this post on Slashdot:
“Mount Wilson is in danger from the Station fire burning near L.A. Their servers have gone offline, but there’s a temporary mirror cam. It doesn’t look good. Picture twenty-four on the L.A. Times photo gallery shows the observatory from the air. If anyone has any inside news on the condition of the facility, I’m sure there are lots of people on Slashdot that would love to hear it.”
It got me wondering about what type of SensorProbes they have. Most companies will never see this size of fire, but even a tiny fire can put a server room out of commission. That is why it is so important to use sensor probe technology to monitor our environment and alert us when something is wrong.
Anyway, I don’t want to use this as a sales pitch. So, let’s use the fire in California to remind us to check our home and office fire detection systems.
My prayers go out to all of the fire fighters, the people who have lost their homes and the people who’s homes are in danger.
- JimmyD
Monitoring for Smoke at a National Level
Filed under: environmental monitoring, Intelligent Sensors, Security Monitoring, SensorProbes, smoke detector
Monitoring the data room, your home, or for smoking in the boys room is just the beginning. The United States Government takes monitoring smoke and air seriously. 
Check out the smoke map maintained by the Interagency Real Time Smoke Monitoring web site. I drilled in on California and clicked on the center of the state. The air and smoke quality doesn’t look as good as other parts of the state.
Yosemite National Park
California likes their state parks. They have a web site showing off how they measure smoke ozone levels, particulate matter levels and more. The site provides air quality and smoke monitoring trends as well as web cameras. The cameras actually allow you to see the differences in air quality. I thought it was cool.
Ravica provides smoke detectors for $125.00 and security cameras on the SecurityProbe for $1,795.00. These probes also monitor temperature, humidity, water, etc., and it supports SNMP, so that you can trend the data over time.
Our services department can set you up with a monitoring web page like Yosemite. Just tell us what you need and we’ll help you get started.
- Mike
SNMP support for the SecurityProbe allows secure data center monitoring
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, Intelligent Sensors, power monitoring, Security Monitoring, smoke detector, temperature monitoring, water leak monitoring
In 2004, the IETF officially recognized SNMP v3, as defined by RFC 3411–RFC 3418, as the current standard version of the Simple Network Management Protocol. SNMP v2, although being a highly competent and widely used protocol, was severly lacking in the areas of security and remote configuration. Thus, SNMP v3 was born.
SNMP v3 added some much needed security features, like ensuring message integrity, verifying that the message came from a valid source with authentication, and packet encryption to ensure that messages aren’t being disseminated by unauthorized sources.
Because of its enhanced security features, SNMP v3 quickly found itself a requirement for many government and secure corporate projects. Since 2004, SNMP v3 has found itself a home in most networks with any sort of security requirements.
That is why the Ravica SecurityProbe line of SensorProbes supports SNMP v3. From within the Settings tab, simply select SNMP under the Connectivity header to the left. You will see the screen below.
From here you can select the type of security features required:
- No Authentication
- Authentication Only
- Authentication & Encryption
Enter your desired password, choose your authentication protocol and access privilege, then it’s off to the races. Now all of your SNMP information will be sent/polled from the SecurityProbe in version 3.
This is a highly popular feature amoung SecurityProbe users. Hopefully, if you didn’t already know it was there, you will find it valuable to impliment in your network. It is now as easy as ever to keep your physical data room details secure.
~ Jon Mills
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Five major data center outages reported last week
Filed under: Data Center, power monitoring, SensorProbes, smoke detector
The website Data Center Knowledge recently published an alarming report about five major data center outages that occurred in the past week. Here is a brief breakdown from the article.
- “On Monday June 29, Rackspace Hosting (RAX) experienced a power outage at its Dallas data center that left several areas of the facility without power for about 45 minutes, knocking many popular customer web sites offline.
- “Early Thursday Equinix Inc. (EQIX) data centers in Sydney, Australia and Paris each experienced power failures. While the power outages were brief – Equinix said the Sydney event lasted 12 minutes while power was restored in Paris in just one minute – many key customer sites took considerably longer to recover their systems. The Sydney event led to disruptions for VoIP service in parts of Australia, while the Paris outage caused downtime for the popular video site DailyMotion and the French portal for hosting firm ClaraNet.
- “Google App Engine, the company’s cloud computing platform, had lengthy performance problems on Thursday, experiencing high latency and data loss.
- “A fire at Fisher Plaza in Seattle late Thursday night left many of the building’s data centers without power. The fire in an basement-level electrical room triggered sprinklers and caused extensive damage to generators and electrical equipment. The damage left tenants with backup plans offline for hours, and those without backup sites down until temporary generators restored power early Saturday morning. The biggest impact was at payment gateway Authorize.net, which was offline for more than 12 hours, leaving its merchant customers unable to process credit card sales. Other sites experiencing lengthy downtime included AdHost, GeoCaching and Microsoft’s Bing Travel.
- “Early Sunday, July 5, a fire at 151 Front Street, the major carrier hotel in Toronto, knocked out power on several floors of the facility used by Peer 1 networks. Power was restored in about 3 hours, after a damaged UPS unit was bypassed.”
The author, Rich Miller then goes on to point out some tough questions and the lessons learned from these outages.
Although it is surprising that data centers of this size can experience an outage like this, what is even more surprising is that it all happened in a week’s span. I wonder, is the National Security Agency going to look into this?
The equipment used to monitor this size data center is monumental, but even the smallest IT department can obtain economically priced sensor equipment, like the Bitsight8, combined with Intelligent Sensors, like the AC Voltage Detector and the Digital Voltometer.
Smoke detector configuration settings for your SensorProbe
Filed under: Data Center, environmental monitoring, SensorProbes, smoke detector
Because of the similarities in how the smoke detector and dry contact sensors work, when a smoke detector sensor is connected to any of the Ravica SensorProbe models it will be recognized as dry contact sensor. The real differences lie in how the user configures and labels the sensor.
Therefore, when connecting a new smoke detector sensor, change the description to “Smoke Detector” or something similar, then update the web interface settings for the smoke detector to reflect the options below.
Direction: Input
Normal State: Open/+5 Volts
Output Level: Low/GND
Congratulations! You now have a properly configured smoke detector sensor watching over you.
Other valuable tips for configuring your Ravica environmental monitoring systems can be found on our support FAQ.
~ Jon Mills
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