Remote Administration

Reducing costs is a primary goal of much of the technical development effort being done. A major cost factor in embedded systems is long term maintenance costs. Not only the direct costs of servicing the devices on a routine basis, but also the indirect maintenance related costs of system down-times and system upgrades are an important factor. A reduction of these costs can be achieved if embedded systems have the ability of remote administration. This encompasses the following basic tasks:

• remote monitoring of system status (local shell access, web-interface, off-site logging to a central facility, etc.).
• remote access to the system in a secure manner allowing full system access. This can be done via encrypted connections (VPN) allowing a high level of security for almost any protocol used between the target system and a central management-system.
• the ability of the system to contact administration/service personnel via mail/phone, based on well definable criteria.
• System tendency analysis - allowing early fault detection and intervention as well as post-mortem analysis.
• upgrade-ability of the system in a safe manner over the network, allowing not only full upgrades but also fixing of individual packages/services.

A GNU/Linux based embedded system is well suited for these tasks, providing well tested server and clients for encrypted connections, embeddable web-servers as well as system log facilities that are capable of remote logging and inter-operation with almost any Server-OS. Outgoing calls from an embedded system, that are necessary to satisfy these criteria are also well established in GNU/Linux, allowing for connections to be established via any of the common network types available, including dialing out via a modem line.