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 downtimes 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 (web-interface, 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.
• the ability of the system to contact administration/service personnel via mail/phone, based on well definable criteria.
• 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 in most cases. 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.