Alarm on breakage of ethernet communication link

Hi;

We have been searching a device which can enable an alarm contact if Ethernet communication breaks between a PC and LAN.
Application is simple; a machine PC (having WXP) is connected with company LAN and getting information (jobs data)from other PCs. Sometime Ethernet communication breaks but operator don’t know about it. So we want to give an alarm indication or switch on a buzzer for operator whenever communication breaks. Kindly tell us if you have any solution for this problem.

I can't say I've heard of such a standalone device.

You could look at Zabbix software to monitor the PC via SNMP. Or you could program something that keeps a ping to that PC and triggers an alarm if it stops getting replies.

Going at it cheaply, an Arduino would likely be able to do this... I'm sure I've seen something like this on the internet before.

AB2005 said:

Hi;

We have been searching a device which can enable an alarm contact if Ethernet communication breaks between a PC and LAN.
Application is simple; a machine PC (having WXP) is connected with company LAN and getting information (jobs data)from other PCs. Sometime Ethernet communication breaks but operator don’t know about it. So we want to give an alarm indication or switch on a buzzer for operator whenever communication breaks. Kindly tell us if you have any solution for this problem.

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I'm unsure what you mean by Ethernet communication breaks, do you mean the application (you don't mention what software PC is using) stops communicating at its software level or there is a physical break in the network ?

If its the former then you need to look at the application to see if you can find out what's happening and raise an alarm at source in the application whihc should be a fairly simple task if its SCADA or HMI application

If it's the latter you could just use a basic managed switch, for example the Moxa EDS-405A has an alarm contact on it that can be configured to operate if the link is down, page 3-70 in the manual linked
https://www.moxa.com/doc/man/Moxa_Managed_Switches_UM_e9.5.pdf

There is all kinds of "Ethernet/Tcp" monitoring software on the Internet that can be downloaded for even FREE. Some will have alarm notification some will not.

However, if you are a programmer of (VB,C,C#,C++,Python) almost any of them will have a "PING" feature. Just ping the other devices on your network and when a Ping fails you have lost communication.

You could simply put a clock (with a second hand) on the screen that is being updated by a time server