Using Mobile Phone email addys for monitoring

Thu Sep 6 22:07:14 UTC 2007

On 9/6/07, Todd Underwood <todd-nanog at renesys.com> wrote:

> as much as i hate to say it, verizon has been extremely reliable on
> the smtp<->sms gateway.  been using them for paging for 3 years or so
> now and never had a significant (detected) failure or latency.
>
> if you don't like this way of doing things you could get an gprs modem
> and originate sms directly from the computer.

I miss the old days of hanging a modem off the side of the monitoring
server and having it send a coded numeric page when something died.
Seemed like that was much more reliable. I'd second the recommendation
to go the modem route.

Or, if you want to mess around just trying things without spending any
money, try doing something like sending the alerts to a Gmail account,
on which you have forwarding set up to go to the gateway. Or have a
shell/perl/fetchmail script on another box offside download that Gmail
message and feed it to the SMS mail gateway.

I'd also perhaps set up (light, not excessive) monitoring of the
provider's inbound SMTP gateway for a bit, to see if you can prove if
it's your issue or theirs. If you can't reach their SMTP gateway
consistently, then try it from another connection on another network
(assuming you've got nine shell accounts around the world like most
admins seem to), and if the reliability data is similar, you know the
provider's got the problem, and you really need to either pound on the
provider, switch providers, or go the modem route.

I also have the feeling that unless you get a hold of somebody who
actually works on those servers at T-Mobile, their support people are
going to tell you it's working, no matter what, because it's a complex
thing that they have no visibility into. I ran into similar fun
conversations with Verizon Wireless in the past, before finally
getting to the actual right person to tell me what I needed to know.

BTW, how I handle it nowadays, believe it or not, is that the alerts
go to a Hotmail account that my Windows Mobile phone accesses. (I
know, I know, people complain about being able to mail to Hotmail -- I
must be one of the lucky ones who knows the secret code to figure it
out.) Has worked fine so far, put it in place a number of weeks ago.

Regards,
Al Iverson

-- 
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