Question OT: Sending SMS alerts.

[ron]

This is not a DB question - but I thought the wise people in this forum may be able to help me.

We have several Progress DBs serving users 24x7 in different countries. Admins are not always on-site and if a problem happens we need to alert people. This is done now with email - but that's not good enough. We used to have an arrangement with our telco to send SMS alerts - but they stopped the service a few months ago. Now I want to implement an equivalent facility.

There are many companies offering an email-to-SMS service - but that is also not good enough: maybe the fault that needs to be reported has also clobbered the email service.

I have a laptop where I've installed Ubuntu. I thought that I could easily hook it into our LAN to catch alerts - and send SMSs using a GSM device plugged-into a USB slot. I downloaded the "gammu" package (which supports sending/receiving SMSs) - but although I can communicate with the GSM device to get its ID - I can't get sending to work. I've tried posting queries on Ubuntu forums - but get no help.

So ... this must be an issue some of you have had to solve. Have you implemented an SMS alert system? What did you use to do it?

Ron.

 

[TomBascom]

I use email gateways to SMS - it works great.

I solve the "mail might not be running" problem in two ways:

1) use an external SMTP - like gmail.

2) ssh to a server that I trust will have mail running.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

We implemented a batch process for sending SMS alerts. I'm foggy on the details but I think we used a PCI GSM modem. I'll see if I can get some details from the developer about the device we used and the software we used to talk to it.

 

[Rob Fitzpatrick]

Hi Ron,

Sorry for the late reply. Here's what I got from our developer:

We purchased software from ActiveXPerts and we interface to that via Microsoft COM objects. We also have a USB, GSM modem right now; just one of those Rogers Turbo sticks, but one could purchase a PCI, GSM modem as well. The ActiveXperts software interfaces to the device. So all we do is open a COM interface to their database and create records. Their software consumes those requests and interfaces to the device to send the messages.

For context, Rogers is a Canadian cellular/Internet service provider. The product we use is SMS Messaging Server 5.1 from ActiveXperts. I hope this helps.