Cell Phones & Text messaging

[Alex Beamish]

On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:40:17 -0500, Alan Cohen
<alan-bdq14YP6qtTV+N59fa8YiVaTQe2KTcn/@public.gmane.org> wrote:
> I've been using an alphanumeric pager for years. The source of most of
> the messages has always been computer systems that tell me when they're
> in trouble. These messages come via Internet (SNPP) and dialup (TAP) for
> cases when the trouble is Internet connectivity.
> 
> I'm thinking about using a cellular phone and would need at least the
> same functionality. So I guess there are 3 questions:
>  (1)the phone
>  (2)the carrier
>  (3)the software (which I could write, I suppose) to make it all work.
> 
> - I'd want to use SNPP/SMTP and TAP or something equivalent, ie:
> Internet with non-Internet fallback
> - One of the downsides heretofore is that the computer could know that
> its message had been sent, but couldn't know that its message had been
> received. Is "received confirmation" a possibility?
> - Any suggestions?

I currently carry a Motorola Talkabout pager equipped with a four line
display and a tiny keyboard. It can send and receive messages, and I
have Nagios (http://www.nagios.org) set up to send the pager messages
at appropriate moments.

When my employer started using this pager with Nagios, we also tried
using my cell phone as a destination; it's a Motorola Timeport that I
got a few years back.

The pager is less susceptible to interference and will work where the
cell phone may not, however I understand that Bell may be phasing out
their text pager support in favour of the Blackberry. In addition, we
found that, depending on what domain you sent the E-Mail to, travel
time varied considerably.

In either case, there's no confirmation that a message was received,
so we have a failover protocol in place. I don't know if using the
Blackberry would solve that.

Alex
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