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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?"

7 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. 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

    1. Re:GSM or GPRS modem by Zocalo · · Score: 2, Informative
      I know that SMS is supposedly not as reliable as a dedicated pager, but I've done exactly was you suggested and never lost an alert. Latency was not an issue either, I don't think it ever took more than 30 seconds from SMS generation to delivery. Then again, this was in the UK and not the US, so your telco mileage may vary and having a facility to resend the SMS if the alert is not acknowledged within an arbitrary time may be a good idea in any case.

      We used an old Sun Ultra 5 acting as the "base station" and Kannel to talk to a mobile phone plugged into the serial port. That's basically it. We could generate an SMS via email or directly scripting Kannel, depending on what we were trying to do, and also provided a webform for human use.

      --
      UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
  2. Re:Just use dialup by kinema · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The problem with email gateways is you have no way of knowing for sure if the email was recived, understood, acted upon and the SMS message was acutally sent.

  3. Re:Out of thin air.. but... by duffbeer703 · · Score: 2, Funny

    How about developing small Lego Mindstorms robots to repair teh network outage? Then you wouldn't need to page anyone!

    --
    Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
  4. EFI Unimobile by More+Trouble · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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

  5. 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.

  6. Go completely analog by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...