Does anyone know of a way to send SMS messages without an internet
connection?
Having a network monitoring system send sms pages via email very quickly
runs into chicken-egg scenario. How do you email a page to let the admins
know their net has gone down. 
AT&T shut down their TAP dialup late last year.
The only method that comes to mind is to buy a GSM modem which has SMS
messaging capability.
Has anyone done this?
-Dan
velcro-strap a cheap, tired old nokia GSM phone with a serial cable to the side of the cabinet, and install something like gnokii (http://www.gnokii.org/) to allow your *ix box to send text messages through it.
Joe
In article <Pine.LNX.4.44.0408030204480.4243-100000@sasami.anime.net>, Dan Hollis <goemon@anime.net> writes
The only method that comes to mind is to buy a GSM modem which has SMS
messaging capability.
I have a Nokia GSM "modem" on a PCMCIA card for my laptop. Usually for dial-up access to the Net when on the move. But it also sends and receives SMS - and obviously a much better UI on the laptop than a phone.
It's about 3 years old now, I've seen them on ebay for peanuts.
<http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=14408&item=631282
2524&rd=1>
ps. It only needs an Orange SIM if you want data at more than 9.6K, SMS will work with any SIM (afaik).
Siemens MC35i -
http://www.siemens-mobile.com/cds/frontdoor/0,2241,hq_en_0_954_rArNrNrNrN,00.html
I've run it (or variants of it) for 3 or 4 years on several systems
without any problems.
-Ronan
Does anyone know of a way to send SMS messages without an internet
connection?
You have been pointed to the Cell phone solutions already (I'd recommend a
Siemens in this case, as it uses AT-commands for
everything ... extremely easy to script these).
Apart from that some Cell phone providers did have a regular phone
number where you could call, and send a message via a terminal
program (might have been a 0900 number). You could ask the provider you
want to send a SMS to, if they have this service.
AT&T shut down their TAP dialup late last year.
Then tell them to reactivate it or tell your boss that your company has to
change cell-phone providers, because
AT&T doesn't provide the service (that you without doubt have in
your contract) anymore.
The only method that comes to mind is to buy a GSM modem which has SMS
messaging capability.
Give the sending PC a modem, to establish a internet connection
with another provider. That way this PC has internet, even if your
connection is broken. Dialup should be enough for sending out a SMS.
Nils
We use SNPP directly to our Nextel phones. AFAIK nextel has an SNPP dialup at
NPA-NXX-NOTE where the NPA-NXX is the same as your phone number. We have
nagios due this via qpage, works like a charm.
-Patrick
Any reason the monitor can't be external, then send an SMS via email
directly to the cell phone provider, rather than an alias on the down
network?
If it's a private network, it could do a web request every minute to a
monitor. If it hasn't received a request in two minutes, send the
page directly to the SMS provider.
If you put your monitor on the other side of the broken link, external
to your network, then pages directly to the cell provider will go
through. So, if your T3 goes down, an external monitor that is not
affected by the outage can send the page.
Mark Radabaugh wrote:
Dan Hollis wrote:
Does anyone know of a way to send SMS messages without an internet connection?
Having a network monitoring system send sms pages via email very quickly runs into chicken-egg scenario. How do you email a page to let the admins know their net has gone down.
AT&T shut down their TAP dialup late last year.
The only method that comes to mind is to buy a GSM modem which has SMS messaging capability.
Has anyone done this?
-Dan
We use a standard modem and pestered Alltel until they gave us the secret modem->SMS gateway number.
Nagios includes /usr/local/bin/sms_client. Fairly simple to use:
Usage: sms_client -v
      sms_client -d
      sms_client [-q][-l loglevel]
                 [service:]number|name[,name|[service:]number...]
                 [message] ...As long as the monitoring server and the phone lines are working it works great.
Mark Radabaugh
Amplex
Dan Hollis wrote:
Does anyone know of a way to send SMS messages without an internet connection?
Having a network monitoring system send sms pages via email very quickly runs into chicken-egg scenario. How do you email a page to let the admins know their net has gone down.
AT&T shut down their TAP dialup late last year.
The only method that comes to mind is to buy a GSM modem which has SMS messaging capability.
Has anyone done this?
-Dan
We use a standard modem and pestered Alltel until they gave us the secret TAP gateway number.
Nagios is configured to use sms_client: http://www.smsclient.org/
Works great other than being a royal pain in the rear when a lot of things go down and dependencies are not set up in Nagios... I'll fix that one of these days 
Mark Radabaugh
Amplex
One thing to watch.. these can be temperamental and liable to be disconnected
without warning (or perhaps thats just here in the uk!)
If you set this up as an emergency emergency system and it doesnt get used
regualrly you might not realise the service has gone away...
Steve
This is exactly what happened with AT&T. They shutdown their TAP gateway
without warning, much to the surpise of many.
-Dan
Likewise, you can just give your monitoring machine a dialup or DSL connection into someone else's network. It logs in, and sends through their mail server.
Very few times will you run into such a large problem that your dial-up provider and your own network both can't reach your cell/paging provider. That scenario used to happen a lot more in the past than it has in the last 4 years in my experience.
I also remember when the satellite that provided most of NA's satellite paging had issues and nobody was getting pages unless they had a local pager number backup.
Plan for the level of paranoia you want. If you use a national dialup provider, you can always give your monitoring machine a few dialups all over the country to try and connect through -- to avoid local problems.
Deepak Jain
AiNET
Brett wrote:
Use TAP (telocator access protocol) your monitoring application dials a
modem pool logs on and sends a text message to the subscriber.
Verizon, Cingular, Nextel all offer this service as does Skytel and most
of the paging vendors.
                            Scott C. McGrath