Text messaging cell phones during network failure

TeKniques

Anyone have any ideas how to implement this? I want to set up some sort of notification when the network goes down. I have heard of this, but not sure where to start.

If anyone knows of any ways to implement this, I would really appreciate it. I can't seem top find a solution online, but I'm probably not searching under the right parameters.

Many thanks.

sprkymrk

First thing you need is a dial-out modem installed in a server or network appliance. Then you need software to send the alert and the specific message you want sent. Sometimes you can write your own simple script to accomplish this depending on your equipment.

Second you need to define an alert to trigger the program to send the page. For instance, do you want an alert when server xyz goes down, or when the firewall goes down, or when the smtp daemon quits responding on the mail server, or what? "When the network goes down" is kind of generic. This can also be accomplished with home grown scripts (batch, shell, vbscript, perl, pick your poison) and your own skill/ingenuity determines how simple or elaborate the alert can be. An example is to set up a script that pings all of your servers and firewall 5 times each, then waits for 30 seconds and repeats itself. You can then program in logic that says if a specific device does not respond twice in a row, it sends a page via modem specifying device xyz (use variables) has been offline for over 1 minute. Then do not ping that device for 5 minutes, and ping again. If it replies or not, have another page sent with a message stating either device xyz is back online, or is still offline and no more pages will be sent until it is back online and responding for at least 3 minutes (or whatever).

Other options include commercial offerings like IP Sentry or open source projects like nagios.

TeKniques

Woohoo, thanks sprkymrk. I can write the script no problem and set up the alert. In fact, I just got out of the server room and made sure I had an open phone port in there with an external modem :P

Muchas Gracias

sprkymrk

Cool. I was going to try and dig up the script I used before we bought a commercial offering, but if you already did it that's great. I seem to recall having to use a batch file to call hyperterminal to run the modem commands, but I couldn't remember exactly. If your email server is okay, and your Internet connection is okay, you can have it use SMTP to email a TAPI compliant pager.