This is my primary focus right now. I’m trying to create a Network Appliance that small businesses can plug into their network to enable monitoring. Solorwinds and a number of other companies do similar things, but they all require software installation, and they often charge by computer.
The idea behind this device (Zapper, lil’Z, Zalaxy Small Network Appliance, Fred – I still don’t know what to call it) is that you can plug it into any network. It will map everything automatically (optionally configure SNMP for more monitoring options), and display the data on my website. An entire subnet can be monitored per device, and the price is fixed at $49.95/month (hopefully I can keep it at that price).
Okay. I know. There isn’t a lot to it. I spent a ton of money creating and buying these things. I had 1,000 of them custom made in China in 2019 (the irony, right). I still have 940 left.
I spent a lot of money advertising them, but still haven’t made much headway. I figure I will just keep trying to add products to my website to see how well they sell. I’m not quite ready to give up on this little venture.
This used to be Iltz, but it didn’t gain any traction, and I kind of let it go to seed. It’s been a long time since I looked at it, but I’m bringing it back up as GadgetWiz (it’s initial site name).
There are some issues still (sessions aren’t working properly right now so it’s pretty useless). Hopefully I will have the major bugs worked out within a week. I just brought the site back up a few minutes ago (2/19/2021).
I’m considering open-sourcing the software. I spent a few months putting it together after work, and some people might find it useful for their own projects. My only concern is that I took quite a few short-cuts in the code. It didn’t make sense to write perfect code if it wasn’t going to take off, right?
Either way, I might re-use some of the code for Zalaxy, and I might open source that code too.
Edit: As of today, I applied the MIT License and opened the software up: https://github.com/joelgriffiths/GadgetWizRentals