iBoot-G2+

Ever since COVID we have been working mostly remote from our office. It happened once our router stopped working and needed someone to physically reboot it to get it to work. In order to prevent having to travel to the office should this ever happen I looked and found this device. I have it configured to ping google and amazon every 30 seconds and if after 15 minutes it gets no response on any of those pings it power cycles the router (its network cable goes direct to the router to avoid other issues from causing the ping to fail). Installed this around Dec 2020 and actually today was working and suddenly my remote connection went dead. I have access to various other items in my office remotely and nothing was accessible. After a little while it all came back to life. I checked the log on this device and sure enough for the first time since Dec it failed on the pings and power cycled. I have no idea if that is what fixed it or if it was a temporary issue with our internet provider, but hey, it did its job. For the record, I know that network people hate this as they would rather trouble shoot the issue then have to power cycle as in their opinion these devices never should go down, but hey it worked. What else can I ask for. The reason I do pings to both Amazon and Google and have it have to fail for 15 minutes is to eliminate as much as reasonably possible the chance it should reboot the router for intermittent internet issues. Also, if a router is doing an update, 15 minutes should be sufficient for the update to complete. Don't want the switch rebooting the router prematurely then. Also 15 minutes seemed a manageable amount of downtime during the workday. Longer than that is too much. If you need something like this, get it. It saved me tonight an late night drive into the office and back (did not want to go in tomorrow by day) which would take at least an hour driving time.

We occasionally have problems with our Cox’s Communications internet connection going down while using the Motorola SB6141 modem. This outage seems to occur at random times and dates. Nothing that we can easily track or pinpoint since the connection will work well for months and then with no change to anything that we know of, the connection will be lost several times a day requiring a reboot of the modem to re-establish a connection. We have changed out the modem and the router with no help. In an attempt to document the days and times of the outages and to automatically reset the system I purchased the iBoot-G2+. The feature we are using is the auto ping feature. With this enabled, we have the unit ping Google or Facebook every minute and when the system doesn’t receive a reply in a couple of tries we have the iBoot-G2+ automatically re-boot the router. This is not a solution or answer to our question of WHY the system is occasionally dropping off line but it is great way to document the outage and to automatically reboot the system so we don’t even recognize that the internet was offline. My only constructive comment on improving the design is to increase the number of log items available. Currently only the most recent 32 events are recorded and it would be great to see that number doubled. All in all, I highly recommend the product!

I think this product is just ok. My use case is a bit different than the other reviewers. I'm not using this device to reboot hardware if the internet connection goes down, I am using this to interactively reboot test equipment that I access remotely through a VPN connection. My biggest complaint is that the device does not register its hostname with the network's DNS server. This is an issue because my VPN connection uses an IPv6 tunnel, and I cannot talk directly to IPv4 addresses, I have to look them up by hostname. According to a comment on their support forum, they have fixed this with their iBoot-G2 product, but they have not yet released an update for the iBoot-G2+. The other issues I have had involve the interfaces to control this programmatically seeming to be somewhat flaky. When I was sitting next to it, I was able to use their command-line application to reliably power-cycle my hardware. When I am working remotely, the same application becomes very unreliable. It still works if I manually control it through the web page, but the command line tool only sometimes works. In summary, this has helped solve some real productivity issues for me, but there is definitely room for improvement.

For the cost, this is not bad for the class. I got it to mainly help with a problematic remote Synology NAS that has locked a few times (firmware bugs). I didn't feel like trekking across town to deal with it in the middle of the night. Pros 1) Web base interface. 2) Power on, Power Off, Power Cycle 3) Can be set to ping 2 separate IPs to help set AND/OR configuration for power cycling 4) Price (not great but not outrageous either) 5) Can be expanded if needed Cons 1) Bulky, lots of thick cables and the unit itself it just a lot of space for that it does. I've seen other (way more costly or no longer made) units that were half its size. This isn't great for rack or tight spaces in a data center. 2) No option for HTTPS, not that I would ever risk this on public Internet, but good security should always be an option even behind a VPN/firewall. 3) Telnet in this day an age? This should be changed to SSH. The software worked for me out of the gate (Firefox). Change the password for the admin and network out of the box without any issues. Two of the cons could be solved with software updates. The bulk is just something you'd have to live with or pay a lot more for something smaller. Ultimately does what it needs to do for me.

Everything was fairly intuitive, had no issues. Works great for a beach house to maintain connection after power cycle of equipment.

Works well.

Good product and quick shipping