[103885] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Postmaster @ vtext.com (or what are best practice to send SMS
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (David Coulson)
Wed Apr 16 15:25:28 2008
Date: Wed, 16 Apr 2008 15:19:30 -0400
From: David Coulson <david@davidcoulson.net>
To: David Ulevitch <davidu@everydns.net>
CC: nanog@merit.edu
In-Reply-To: <48063098.2050500@everydns.net>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
In my experience, even with TAP, sending messages to a cell phone is
spotty at best. I have folks on both uni-directional pagers via TAP or
SNPP, as well as cell phones via e-mail and TAP. There isn't a
noticeable difference in delivery time between e-mail and TAP on the phones.
Cell to Cell is probably the best option if you want to stick with SMS
to cell phones. I have no idea how reliable it is between carriers. I
still get some comfort knowing that people have pagers with a TAP
gateway - I've no idea how the technology differs between a pager and
SMS, but it seems much more reliable. All of the pager problems I've had
in the last few years have been, erm, 'payment related'.
David Ulevitch wrote:
>
> We've noticed that 1234567890@vtext.com is no longer a very reliable
> form of delivery for alerts from Nagios, et al. It seems as our
> volume of alerts has risen, our delivery rate has dropped precipitously.
>
> We don't expect much trying to actually reach a postmaster for
> vtext.com so I thought the better question would be to ask what the
> current best practice is to get SMS alerts out?
>
> Back in the day, I remember a company I worked for had something
> called a TAP gateway. Is that still a good route? I've also been
> told to check out an SMS gateway/api service called clickatell.com --
> anyone using them to delivering timely notifications?
>
> Is the best thing to do to try and get a programmable cellphone in a
> datacenter?
>
> What else are operators doing to get the pages out when things go wonky?
>
> -David
>
