[99123] in North American Network Operators' Group
Using Mobile Phone email addys for monitoring
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Rick Kunkel)
Thu Sep 6 16:48:40 2007
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2007 13:46:18 -0700 (PDT)
From: Rick Kunkel <kunkel@w-link.net>
To: nanog@merit.edu
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
Hello folks,
First off, apologies if this is off topic. I'm hoping that system and
network monitoring tip are enough of a common issue that this falls under
the group's charter.
We've traditionally used mobile phone email addresses for system
notifications, but over the past 6-12 months, it seems to have become
increasingly sketchy.
For instance, if an application fails to contact a certain service on a
certain server, it sends an email (through it's own SMTP service, to avoid
a chicken-and-egg prob if/when our main SMTP service fails) to
1234567890@tmomail.net. (Obviously, that was a fake number.) More and
more, I'm getting less and less of these notifications.
It seems especially prevalent when MANY things are sent at once; if, for
example, a central piece fails, and dependent pieces suddenly fail as
well.
I try to telnet to mailx.tmomail.net port 25 and get sometimes good,
sometimes laggy, and sometimes no response. T-Mobile, support levels all
the way up to 3 tell me that it's not them, and everything should work
wonderfully.
Is SMTP to a mobile phone a fundamentally flawed way to do this?
Anyone else have any issues, past or present, with this kind of thing?
Thanks,
Rick Kunkel
