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Alternatives to TAP for Outage Alerts?
anton[1452] asks: "AT&T Wireless has discontinued TAP dialup access to text messaging. I have used this for years to send alerts in the event of network outages. The alternatives they offer are not free and worse, require network connections - making them useless for my needs. Does anyone have a better way to do this without resorting to carrying a separate pager?"
What about the AT&T Relay? If you used it through dialup, would that work? Alternatively, what if you connected a cell phone to the computer via an X-JACK (or whatever it's called) connector, and uesd that for text messaging?
Could store it away for a rainy day and only use it when your network fails. Wouldn't cost much at all.
It's a little less elligent, but I use an independent monitor. Scripts running on a site that is hosted independently monitor the availability of my network. When there is a problem they just send emails to the phones that need alerting (basic sms messages). All the phone companies that I have tried support sms via email.
You could just get a dial up from juno or something and do that. It's easier to just have sms messages sent to a cell than carry multiple gadgets.
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
If not, obviously I'm some kind of idiot.
Even so, it seems like it makes a lot of common sense to allow direct e-mail to text message.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Not sure what AT&T Tap was, and can't find out since it is now discontinued. More importantly you left no info about your requirements? Sounds to me like you just want to be able to txt message a few cell phones, I don't see why you can't just go online and do it. I use to have AT&T Wireless Services and wrote a quick curl script that used http://www.mobile.att.net/messagecenter/ to send me pages. As I recall it was a five line shell script, not too hard to replicate. I guess not having info about tap makes it really hard to understand your specific situation situation. Please provide more details!
Can I get an eye poke?
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Yup, please see "WTF is TAP" for further elucidation.
See, the problem here is unless there's someone else with the poster's exact problem (possible, but doubtful -- most people are trying to do everything they possibly can over a network connection, looking forward to the day they can iShit) -- noone is going to know what the heck this person is talking about. So until the original poster puts a little more detail into explaining their needs and their system, we'll probably all be in the dark and won't be able to help them.
I mean, the real mental stumbling point is this: if they've got a computer that can perform a modem dialup, why can't that computer just send a frikkin' e-mail, which pretty much every messenging service in the whole world responds swimmingly to?
Make your monitoring system call a dialup isp instead of the tap gateway. Then you can send email to the phone without your local network being up at all.
It's pretty easy to set up dial on demand with a timeout so you're not connecting and disconnecting from the isp every 3 minutes. Then you're still able to drop your connection when you don't need it for more than say, 15 minutes.
When I read "network outages", I assume the poster meant computers/servers on their network going down. Now I'm guessing they meant network routers, judging by this similar posting. It looks like before you could dialup directly into AT&T's system, thus avoiding the need to use a network connection in the hopefully rare case that no network connection is available.
My suggestion is to set up a dialup account that gives limited text-based access, so that you can send the alert messages through that system. So long as the dial-up company is different than the provider of the routers' connection, that connection should stay up. And if both ISPs are down at the same time, that probably means you've got bigger problems than just your own network being down. I don't know where you'd start your search (well, I mean of course google obviously, but beyond taht...) but I'm sure you could easily find text-based internet access for around $10/month, which isn't all that much. Also, you'd have access to a remote machine you could use to test latency and other network availability issues.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
Attach a GSM/GPRS modem to the host that sends out the messages! Not only can you then send SMS, you could also conceivably get an IP connection to the send email through another service....which narrows down the issues with SMS latency.
;-p
You *do* have a phone that can get SMS, don't you?
-psy
Buy a cellular telephone subscription, write a java (or whatever the phone supports) applet to interface with your monitoring hardware (insight manager or whatever it may be), and have the phone send an SMS message in case something goes down...
Or even better, use the Nextel/Verizon walkie-talkie feature.. nothing like a syntehsized voice announcing "Help, router ABC has fallen and it can't get up" to your entire support group.
I remember hearing some story about ATT going completely digital and dumping all their analog equipment. THis could be the first manifestation of that change. Anyone else know anything about this?
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In my reading, it sounds like AT&T has outsourced their TAP interface to EFI Unimobile. See the EFI Unimobile page on the subject. I guess it will cost, while AT&T's direct TAP number was probably free. However, it does sound like it will still be useful for sending alerts about your network.
:w
using voice?
The network he'd be sending the message on is not the same network that's down. More likely it's a problem of signing everyone up for accounts on the SMS network and then getting those accounts to work with their phones.
Why is this important? assume you'd normally use the pager provider's web page to send messages. This is very easy to script using curl or several other tools. However, what if the failed service is your internet connection, router or something else that prevents you from reaching the web server and sending the message this way?
This is where TAP comes to the rescue, since we bypass the network and require only a modem and a working, standard phone line. If both the network connection and the phone line failed at the same time, or worse, the provider's paging system is off-line, then it means a major disaster has struck and any reports about network condition are most likely futile.
My recommendation would be to get a cell phone that can receive SMS and modify your monitoring scripts so they use your cell phone provider's web page to send messages. Then get a dial up access account, one that doesn't depend on your network being up, and configure things so that, if your main network link is down, your scripts first start a connection on your alternate dial up account, in order to reach your provider's web page and alert you. Another option, one that would only depend on the POTS and your cell phone being operational, would involve rigging the Festival voice synthesizer with mgetty+voice to enable the system to call you on your cell phone directly and deliver the failure message by voice. Still, I think that the redundancy built into the first solution is good enough.
Use a voice modem and call the person's cell phone.
"Help! Help! The power went out!"
"Help! Help! Someone is stealing the router!"
Hopefully, your techs won't think it's Stephen Hawking who needs assistance...
I've seen text messages sent to a phone take over an hour to be delivered. On multiple carriers.
And according to this article from January, in some places as much as 7.5% of SMS messages fail to be delivered.
We use SkyTel 2-Way service for our critical paging. They provide delivery status tracking, and since the paging is 2-way, can actually verify that the page was delivered.
We do use phone messaging as a backup notification method for our staff who happen to live in SkyTel coverage holes, so the AT&T change is still biting us. We haven't found a solution yet.
Some paging providers still offer TAP interfaces, you may just have to switch paging providers. I think we are currently using a TAP interface to send pages to a 'page group' that has all of the NOCish ppl in it so we only have to make one outgoing call to page everyone with UP/DOWNS. IIRC we worked for a while with a Nextel rep and were able to get TAP access for text messaging to Nextel phones, so if you're a Nextel shop you may want to look into that. I don't know if you can get page groups with the Nextel TAP interface, I seem to remember the paging interface having to make many calls to Nextel to get the page out to everyone.
Welcome to gnokii.org gnokii provides tools and a user space driver for use with mobile phones under Linux, various unices and Win32. For a list of supported makes and models take a look at our FAQ pages. With gnokii you can do such things as make data calls, update your address book, change calendar entires, send and receive SMS messages and load ring tones depending on the phone you have.
As for solutions to the problem, I'm going to have to cast another vote for a voice modem and text-to-speech system; this allows you to configure error messages as much as you like, and costs you money only for setup and in an actual emergency. Also, you can get basic delivery confirmation based on who picks up and who doesn't. It might not be the best idea for a system that requires multicast over a large group or contact over a noisy link (voice synths can be hard to understand).
The flexibility, though, is the real strong point: with a bit of perl, you could probably get the system to repeat back error data. Even better, with a bit more work you could probably set up basic commands via touch tones (press one for hard reboot, press two for soft reboot, press three to restart apache, etc.) and perhaps not have to come in at all.
That's it. I'm no longer part of Team Sanity.
I used to have my system call the pager directly. Add a bunch of waits if your pager has a message like "after the beep, enter your numeric message". Do /not/ use 911 as any part of the message. I must have called 911 about 20 times during initial setup before they called me and said they were sending a car, and I knocked it off.
Works well though, and just make it a unique numeric page and you'll know exactly what it means.
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I wasn't aware there was a "text-based internet" out there.
The problem is that e-mail and SMS messages have *no* guaranteed Quality Of Service associated with them (see RFC on SMTP for examples). This can be in direct conflict with a SysAdmin teams' QoS guarantees for server uptime and downtime responsiveness. TAP provides for an interface that uses plain ol analog telephone equipment, which has Federally mandated requirements (or at least used to) for uptime and availability.
why not something like skytel? i use it and its great via modem or via smtp. especially with the two way paging.
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Use sprintpcs. They still offer unlimited free tap messaging. E-mail me for the access number if you have trouble finding it on the sprint pcs developer's site.
Word of caution: we upgraded to sprintpcs after years of using Metrocall. While I like the convenience of having the cell phone, my messaging range is limited inside buildings in ways it never was with a pager. Very infrequently I wish I still used the pager.
But, since you've been using AT&T, you should be used to it by now.
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Can't send stuff down the pipe if the pipe is hosed
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