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Alternatives to TAP for Outage Alerts?

Posted by Cliff on from the early-warning-systems dept.

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?"

3 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Maybe I'm just stupid, but... by greenhide · · Score: 0, Interesting
    Unless TAP behaves very differently than normal text messaging, shouldn't these instructions work (taken from AT&T's Text messaging howo):
    Address the e-mail to the 10-digit wireless phone number followed by @mobile.att.net. For example, if the phone's number is 206.123.4567, then the e-mail address is: 2061234567@ mobile.att.net.
    Assuming that TAP works the same way of course.

    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.
  2. GSM or GPRS modem by psyconaut · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    You *do* have a phone that can get SMS, don't you? ;-p

    -psy

  3. What's TAP? by Roadmaster · · Score: 3, Interesting
    TAP is a protocol that enables one to connect via modem to a special dialup number and interface directly with the pager service. In essence this allows one to talk directly with the pager system at AT&T and send messages from there.


    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.