On 9/6/07, Todd Underwood <todd-nanog@renesys.com> wrote:
as much as i hate to say it, verizon has been extremely reliable on the smtp<->sms gateway. been using them for paging for 3 years or so now and never had a significant (detected) failure or latency.
if you don't like this way of doing things you could get an gprs modem and originate sms directly from the computer.
I miss the old days of hanging a modem off the side of the monitoring server and having it send a coded numeric page when something died. Seemed like that was much more reliable. I'd second the recommendation to go the modem route. Or, if you want to mess around just trying things without spending any money, try doing something like sending the alerts to a Gmail account, on which you have forwarding set up to go to the gateway. Or have a shell/perl/fetchmail script on another box offside download that Gmail message and feed it to the SMS mail gateway. I'd also perhaps set up (light, not excessive) monitoring of the provider's inbound SMTP gateway for a bit, to see if you can prove if it's your issue or theirs. If you can't reach their SMTP gateway consistently, then try it from another connection on another network (assuming you've got nine shell accounts around the world like most admins seem to), and if the reliability data is similar, you know the provider's got the problem, and you really need to either pound on the provider, switch providers, or go the modem route. I also have the feeling that unless you get a hold of somebody who actually works on those servers at T-Mobile, their support people are going to tell you it's working, no matter what, because it's a complex thing that they have no visibility into. I ran into similar fun conversations with Verizon Wireless in the past, before finally getting to the actual right person to tell me what I needed to know. BTW, how I handle it nowadays, believe it or not, is that the alerts go to a Hotmail account that my Windows Mobile phone accesses. (I know, I know, people complain about being able to mail to Hotmail -- I must be one of the lucky ones who knows the secret code to figure it out.) Has worked fine so far, put it in place a number of weeks ago. Regards, Al Iverson -- Al Iverson on Spam and Deliverability, see http://www.spamresource.com News, stats, info, and commentary on blacklists: http://www.dnsbl.com My personal website: http://www.aliverson.com -- Chicago, IL, USA Remove "lists" from my email address to reach me faster and directly.