[RIPE Atlas Ambassadors] How to get people to actually plug in their probes?

On 09/04/2018 06:32, DurgaPrasad - DatasoftComnet wrote:
> Unless RIPE deploys an uptimerobot type of solution for all the users 
> hosting its probes and notifies them on email and SMS on reachability 
> issues – there won’t be any buy in by the end–users.

There is something - though I also discovered it by accident.
If you look up the probe on the atlas.ripe.net portal, "General" tab,
then scroll down, you get "notifications".
You can set the email address and the threshold time.
You also get a monthly report.

Note that this isn't perfect - since my ISP's PPPoE session doesn't 
negotiate IPv6, there have been times where v6 connect was down
but v4 was still up and the notification mechanism didn't flag that
(and I wasn't home enough to detect through other means).


As to the distribution discussion:
While I see the NCC's need to keep the un-connected rate under control,
I can't help but comment that this is all part of lessons learned.
There have been several lessons, on "power supply reliability",
on "USB-stick technology and durability", on "hand out at conferences",
I think lessons have been learned: depending on circumstances it may
a good idea to include a reliable power supply; running an encrypted
filesystem doesn't help the wear leveling mechanism of an USB storage 
key, and inviting / discussing / vetting new potential hosts beforehand
instead of randomly handing probes out helps to increase the deployment 
percentage (at the cost of making difficult places harder to reach).
I'm hoping that the NCC finds a better way to work with this new
knowledge than to hold this against the people trying to distribute
probes. But it's not my project, if I'm unable to distribute then
that's the way it's going to be.

Geert Jan