Postmaster @ vtext.com (or what are best practice to send SMS these days)

Darryl Dunkin ddunkin at netos.net
Wed Apr 16 17:37:39 UTC 2008


Yes, this is still a good route for those of us with old pagers
(cell/pager via e-mail have had horrendous drop rates for me, likely due
to the volume of messages). If the network issue is severe enough that
your Internet access is not working, you can still dial via a modem.
Even then things don't always get through the provider, so I have two
Nagios systems running in tandem. This means receiving two notices for
each outage, but often enough we still only receive one (even though
each Nagios/qpage server reports a success on both sides).

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-nanog at merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog at merit.edu] On Behalf Of
David Ulevitch
Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2008 10:00
To: nanog at merit.edu
Subject: Postmaster @ vtext.com (or what are best practice to send SMS
these days)


We've noticed that 1234567890 at vtext.com is no longer a very reliable 
form of delivery for alerts from Nagios, et al.  It seems as our volume 
of alerts has risen, our delivery rate has dropped precipitously.

We don't expect much trying to actually reach a postmaster for vtext.com

   so I thought the better question would be to ask what the current 
best practice is to get SMS alerts out?

Back in the day, I remember a company I worked for had something called 
a TAP gateway.  Is that still a good route?  I've also been told to 
check out an SMS gateway/api service called clickatell.com  -- anyone 
using them to delivering timely notifications?

Is the best thing to do to try and get a programmable cellphone in a
datacenter?

What else are operators doing to get the pages out when things go wonky?

-David




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