[Gllug] Pagers

[John Hearns]

On Tue, 8 Oct 2002, Dean Wilson wrote:

> ---- Original Message -----
> From: "Jonathan Dye" <jonathan.dye at automationpartnership.com>
> > > very true
> > > for important server alerts you should probably go for pager or have
> 
> > My experience with pagers is that if you happen to be out of reception
> when
> > the message is sent then you never get it as there is no notification
> back
> > to the sender as to whether you recieved it or not.
> 
> In my current place of emplyment we offer an alerting service to the
> customers when certain events happen (We do site and performance
> monitoring) and after a fair bit of digging around we came up with some
> annoying bits of trivia, when things work they work fine and pretty quick
> but when they play up alerts go missing for hours. Also proving that the
> support crew actually got an alert and didn't just ignore for one more
> round is a right pain.
> 
> Annoying facts
> SMS can take days
> No one wants to carry a phone and a pager.
> Pages are not guarenteed. We were pretty much unable to get a service
> contract that said "In ten minutes you WILL have a page". Its a best effort
> thing.
> SNPP (Simple network Paging Protocol) comes in three main flavours (Last
> time i looked) and i think it was level three that dealt with resends,
> queing and some basic quality of service. Most networks in the UK don't
> support anywhere near this level so its a fire and forget.
> 
> In the end we wrote the above facts and some purty wording in to our own
> SLA's and learned to deal with it. The method we use for critical alerts
> (Such as aircon failure or no coke in the fridge) is a phone call that has
> to be acknowledged otherwise it phones back a number of times and then
> phones your boss. Its pretty effective but you need BT to not screw up the
> lines. Something i considered but never got around to is a nokia mobile
> PCMCIA card in a laptop. THat way if you lose all power and the phone
> system then it can still call out due to laptop battery and the phonecard.

Good idea.
A guy I used to work with wrote
 Python code to send SMS via one of these
okia cardphones.

> 


-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at linux.co.uk
http://list.ftech.net/mailman/listinfo/gllug