Matt G. Watson

Just another geek
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HowTo: Sending SMS Text Messages via sendpage SNPP server

Sunday, June 22nd, 2008

Synopsis

Sendpage is a SNPP server available for Linux (and other UNIX varients probably) that allows you to send SMS text messages to either your cellular phone or pager.  How does it differ than using the SMTP gateway that your cell carrier probably already provides?  Well the biggest benefit is that it does not require Internet access to deliver pages.  Instead Sendpage delivers pages to your device through Paging Central servers that most cellular carriers offer - many of which for free.  Paging Central servers implement a protocol called TAP which is used for one-way text messaging.  This means if you are using paging to notify support employees about server outages and such, your monitoring/alerting solution does not require internet access to deliver pages… which means if your internet connection is the device that dies on you, your support people will know about it.  For instance, we use sendpage in combination with ZenOSS core for alerting our support staff of problems.  ZenOSS has native support for SNPP built right in. (more…)

HowTo: Install Zenoss Core on Gentoo Linux

Sunday, June 15th, 2008

Synopsis

This How To will be a guide to installing Zenoss Core on Gentoo Linux. Zenoss is an enterprise-grade open-source IT Monitoring and Alerting suite. This guide should work on any Linux distribution, but it has only been tested on Gentoo Linux. (more…)