SMS

Tue Sep 22 17:41:25 UTC 2009

Once upon a time, William Herrin <herrin-nanog at dirtside.com> said:
> The Multitech Multimodem GPRS model MTCBA-G-EN-F4 has an ethernet
> port. Add a SIM card from your favorite wireless carrier and you can
> send and receive SMS messages via "AT" commands over a TCP socket.
> Problem is, it seizes up or otherwise founders every few weeks and has
> to be power cycled.
> 
> Has anyone heard of other products with a good reliability record?

We have the MTCBA-G-U-F4-ED (the USB version) and have not had any
trouble.  I had to modify the Linux kernel driver for the chipset used
to load the firmware correctly (and optionally externally instead of
just compiled in), but those changes are in the upstream kernel now.

We haven't had any problem with it locking up or anything; the server
with it attached has been up for a year (as of 41 minutes ago :-) ) with
no problems (haven't had to pull the modem or anything like that).

We have an AT&T SIM card in it, and we did have problems with AT&T's SMS
several months ago; for several hours, they were rejecting messages from
our modem.  Now I have an additional monitor that sends a message to
itself periodically, and (of course) we haven't had that problem since.
-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams at hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.