We have used the Nokia phone tethered to our monitoring pc's for about 6 years now, we have found it a fairly reliable system (we had to build our own 'paging' system and we found that due to issues with the software that communicates with the phone we were forced to implement a 5 limit retry on sending messages - I would say that 99% of our messages get through with this system). However recently we moved to a USB GPRS modem (modex by audiotel) and we've found this solution to be a lot quicker and a lot more reliable. -----Original Message----- From: John @ netTRUST [mailto:john(a)nettrust.net.nz] Sent: Tuesday, 17 April 2007 11:43 a.m. To: nznog(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Subject: Re: [nznog] Save your money and hassle While this apparently* works, if you want a solution that is reliable and widely compatible I recommend use of a serial port SMS modem. * I haven't tried it.
There is of course always the option of just tethering an old phone to a Linux or Windows machine.
I've played around in the past with an old Nokia, using a Linux-compatible knockoff DKU-5 cable (I bought mine from http://www.affordablecomputers.co.nz/ but I assume other retailers will have them).
There's a whole suite of tools available for Linux to interface with a phone in this configuration and send SMSes. Throw an MTA and something like monit in to the mix, and you have a very cheap SMS monitoring solution that doesn't depend on any external ( besides the cell network of course ;) ).
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