Using Mobile Phone email addys for monitoring

Thu Sep 6 23:19:27 UTC 2007

On Sep 6, 2007, at 5:39 PM, Seth Mattinen wrote:

>
> matthew zeier wrote:
>>  > Anyone else have any issues, past or present, with this kind of  
>> thing?
>> It takes ~ 7 minutes from the time Nagios sends an email sms to  
>> AT&T to the time it hits my phone.  I'm using  
>> @mobile.mycingular.com because mmode.com stopped working (which  
>> results in at least two txt pages vs. the one I was used to).
>>  > Is SMTP to a mobile phone a fundamentally flawed way to do this?
>> I'm beginning to think it is!
>
>
> I've never had a problem with Sprint (###@messaging.sprintpcs.com)  
> accepting on their gateway. Although it has always accepted  
> messages, sometimes there was an hour or two delay before the it  
> hit the phone. Also, if you send too many messages too fast it'll  
> stop talking to you for a bit (450 errors) or throttle the SMS  
> delivery. The delay I normally see is under 30 seconds.
>
> If you want to be fancy and take the internet out of the equation,  
> you can use festival with Asterisk to have it call you and speak  
> the messages. (Bonus points for a "press 1 to acknowledge this  
> problem, 2 to escalate, etc." IVR tree.)

I've had issues sometimes with Sprint throttling email -> SMS,   
especially if the message all look very similar.  Also had the stop  
delivering some emails (our trouble ticket notification system  
specifically, they would accept the message and effectively bit  
bucket it).

   We've had very good luck using qpage (http://www.qpage.org/)  to  
send messages via TAP.  It  has  worked for years to our Nextel's   
(NPA-NXX-NOTE), and  I now do the same on my Treo from Sprint.  Just  
need to locate a TAP terminal for your carrier.   We have nagios (and  
various other bits of software) submit pages to a qpage daemon, and  
it handles delivery via dedicated modem, which is nice in case all of  
your upstreams decided to die @ the exact same time.

-Patrick

-- 
Patrick Muldoon
Network/Software Engineer
INOC (http://www.inoc.net)
PGPKEY (http://www.inoc.net/~doon)
Key ID: 0x370D752C

"Life's disappointments are harder to take when you don't know any  
swear words."
  --Calvin & Hobbes