About a week ago I ordered one of these from eBay. It arrived today. I wasn’t expecting it to arrive so soon, considering it comes from Bulgary. Positive point for the Post Service.

I’ve been looking for an inexpensive remote IP-controlled power outlet for a long time. Only thing I was able to found were Remote Power Switches from APC at the affordable price of… one kidney plus an eyeball. Ok, APCs are beautiful, comfortable, convenient, with a lot of management capabilities, SNMP, web interface and so on, but money was a limitation. WAF -Wife Acceptance Factor, is always present.

From now on I can power control my home lab on demand remotely. Up until now each time I had to plan in advance and let it powered on if I was going to work on it remotely. And that sums up a lot to the electric bill.

Searching all across eBAY I ended up finding the NetIO-230.

NetIO-230

By one sixth of the APC I can have the same functionality and reliability as APC, but built by Koukaam

I am gratefuly surprised with all the functions it has. Whoever wants to see the specs can go to the vendor’s website. Only disappointing thing was modifying the IP addressing from the web interface, instead of changind IP, netmask and gateway all at once, it only saves last parameter changed. So instead of changing the three, saving and that’s all, you have to change and save three times to have it configured. Maybe they publish a firmware upgrade later on.

You can power up or down wach outlet independently or even at specified intervals, so you can set outlet 1 to power up in 5 seconds, outlet 2 in 15, outlet 3 in 25 and so on. It also allows to schedule power switching, you can set up system time using NTP and even to get email notifications.

Tested it and works like a charm. Now I only have pending to modify the strips connected to each outlet and get all my lab devices connected to it by sets. Vendor says it supports up to 15A, more than enough I guess.

Conclusion

Cheap and fantastic. I highly recommend it to anyone with similar needs.