Most hosts today have out of band management (on Dell's it's the iDRAC) and most of them constantly monitor all hardware. It's pretty simple to set up email alerts and SNMP if you want to go that route. If your Host doesn't have OOB, then it's time to replace!!
I'm surprised no one has suggested Privoxy which provides an excellent way to achieve what managing host files does. I've used it for years without problems.
Although the one I bought wasn't this expensive (mine was £20 or $30) identical to the one above in the ebay advert but blue in colour. Works great and gets into every nook and cranny.
This week however I want to pose a question for our readers, namely: How do you squeeze the best possible tech support out of your vendor or service provider when you have a problem you can't resolve yourself?
Let me start off by giving my own answer based on years of experience working closely with a large software vendor. Whenever we have worked with this vendor we have used a set of remote access tools provided to us by them so we can gain secure access to resources located on their internal corporate network. We have also had smartcards and passwords issued to us by this vendor which provide the necessary credentials for logging onto their network.
Now because of password policies enforced by this vendor, we have needed to change these passwords regularly every 90 days to ensure continued access. Unfortunately the particular configuration of the PCs we use for gaining remote access to their network means that we have to phone their tech support hotline when we want to change our passwords (i.e. the tools they provided us for resetting our passwords ourselves won't work because of the way the security of our own PCs). So what this means is every three months I need to call a phone number and press a series of numbers to select the option that will connect me with someone who can help me by resetting my remote access password.
The problem of course is that resetting a password is considered by the vendor's tech support department as a "low priority" issue that can be handled by a support person who resides offshore in a low-income country, has minimal training, and follows a script that doesn't include the weird security configuration of our particular setup. As a result, when I press 2 then 4 then 7 then 9 to select the "Reset your RAS password" option, I end up with someone who doesn't understand my problem and keeps trying to get me to try steps I know aren't going to work for me. Then after repeated attempts of my trying to explain to them why their script won't work in my case and what they actually need to do, they eventually give up and hand me off to someone higher up the ladder (but still offshored) and I have to explain everything all over again and hope that this time they get it.
Anyways, you can guess how frustrated this makes me. You've never experienced anything like that before with tech support, right?
Well, eventually I found a simple solution to my problem. Instead of pressing the phone buttons to select the "Reset your RAS password" option, I decided one day to try pressing buttons that would select an option for a more complicated issue, namely the "Problems with RAS connectivity" option. My reasoning was that something more complicated would be handled by a better trained and more experienced support person, and my guess paid off--I was immediately transferred to someone in-country who from the way he talked obviously knew his stuff!
So after he asked me some identification questions and asked me what the problem was, I said plaintively "Could you please help me? I need you to reset my password, I can't do it myself because etc." He immediately understood my problem and had my password reset in under a minute.
There are really two bits of wisdom here, I think. First, do whatever you can to get an *experienced* support person on the other end of the line right from the start. And second, plead for help. After all, you don't want that person to say they don't handle such trivial matters and transfer you to someone offshore to handle you (and I mean "handle" you).
Does this sound ethical? Well, how ethical is it for a company you bought something from or partner with to provide you with poor tech support that ends up frustrating you and wasting half an hour of your valuable time?
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