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Alternatives to TAP for Outage Alerts? 47

Posted by Cliff from the early-warning-systems dept.
anton[1452] asks: "AT&T Wireless has discontinued TAP dialup access to text messaging. I have used this for years to send alerts in the event of network outages. The alternatives they offer are not free and worse, require network connections - making them useless for my needs. Does anyone have a better way to do this without resorting to carrying a separate pager?"
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Alternatives to TAP for Outage Alerts? More

Alternatives to TAP for Outage Alerts?

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  • What about the AT&T Relay [att.com]? If you used it through dialup, would that work? Alternatively, what if you connected a cell phone to the computer via an X-JACK (or whatever it's called) connector, and uesd that for text messaging?
    • I just went and checked out the site.

      The relay itself is a java applet, which makes scripting it pretty hard.

      I got the feeling that the original poster wanted an automated way of calling for help...

    • what if you connected a cell phone to the computer ... and uesd that for text messaging? the problem is, that you only can connect either the power or the data cable to such a phone. The only way to use it would be, if you have an ir connector on the pc. Then you can plug the power cable to the phone and send via ir.
  • Could store it away for a rainy day and only use it when your network fails. Wouldn't cost much at all.
  • It's a little less elligent, but I use an independent monitor. Scripts running on a site that is hosted independently monitor the availability of my network. When there is a problem they just send emails to the phones that need alerting (basic sms messages). All the phone companies that I have tried support sms via email.

    You could just get a dial up from juno or something and do that. It's easier to just have sms messages sent to a cell than carry multiple gadgets.
  • Not sure what AT&T Tap was, and can't find out since it is now discontinued. More importantly you left no info about your requirements? Sounds to me like you just want to be able to txt message a few cell phones, I don't see why you can't just go online and do it. I use to have AT&T Wireless Services and wrote a quick curl script that used http://www.mobile.att.net/messagecenter/ to send me pages. As I recall it was a five line shell script, not too hard to replicate. I guess not having info about

    • Re:Wtf is tap? (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      He wants to do it without network access.
    • Next time google before posting:

      http://fy.chalmers.se/~appro/SITE/IXO.TAP.protocol .html

      TAP is what we used before web pages (and you youngsters) existed...

  • Make your monitoring system call a dialup isp instead of the tap gateway. Then you can send email to the phone without your local network being up at all.

    It's pretty easy to set up dial on demand with a timeout so you're not connecting and disconnecting from the isp every 3 minutes. Then you're still able to drop your connection when you don't need it for more than say, 15 minutes.
  • When I read "network outages", I assume the poster meant computers/servers on their network going down. Now I'm guessing they meant network routers, judging by this similar posting [bb4.com]. It looks like before you could dialup directly into AT&T's system, thus avoiding the need to use a network connection in the hopefully rare case that no network connection is available.

    My suggestion is to set up a dialup account that gives limited text-based access, so that you can send the alert messages through that syste

  • GSM or GPRS modem (Score:4, Interesting)

    by psyconaut ( 228947 ) on Sunday September 14, 2003 @10:34PM (#6960780)
    Attach a GSM/GPRS modem to the host that sends out the messages! Not only can you then send SMS, you could also conceivably get an IP connection to the send email through another service....which narrows down the issues with SMS latency.

    You *do* have a phone that can get SMS, don't you? ;-p

    -psy
    • Alas, SMS to phones just isn't as reliable as a pager; I found that here in the SF bay area there were many, many times when pages came through, but SMS messages did not.

      SMS is nice to have, but if you absolutely, positively have to get a hold of someone, they really need a pager.

    • Re:GSM or GPRS modem (Score:3, Informative)

      by Zocalo ( 252965 )
      I know that SMS is supposedly not as reliable as a dedicated pager, but I've done exactly was you suggested and never lost an alert. Latency was not an issue either, I don't think it ever took more than 30 seconds from SMS generation to delivery. Then again, this was in the UK and not the US, so your telco mileage may vary and having a facility to resend the SMS if the alert is not acknowledged within an arbitrary time may be a good idea in any case.

      We used an old Sun Ultra 5 acting as the "base statio

  • Buy a cellular telephone subscription, write a java (or whatever the phone supports) applet to interface with your monitoring hardware (insight manager or whatever it may be), and have the phone send an SMS message in case something goes down...

    Or even better, use the Nextel/Verizon walkie-talkie feature.. nothing like a syntehsized voice announcing "Help, router ABC has fallen and it can't get up" to your entire support group.

  • I remember hearing some story about ATT going completely digital and dumping all their analog equipment. THis could be the first manifestation of that change. Anyone else know anything about this?

  • EFI Unimobile (Score:4, Insightful)

    by More Trouble ( 211162 ) on Sunday September 14, 2003 @11:35PM (#6961055)
    In my reading, it sounds like AT&T has outsourced their TAP interface to EFI Unimobile. See the EFI Unimobile [unimobile.com] page on the subject. I guess it will cost, while AT&T's direct TAP number was probably free. However, it does sound like it will still be useful for sending alerts about your network.

    :w
  • using voice?

  • What's TAP? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Roadmaster ( 96317 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @12:07AM (#6961188) Homepage Journal
    TAP is a protocol that enables one to connect via modem to a special dialup number and interface directly with the pager service. In essence this allows one to talk directly with the pager system at AT&T and send messages from there.


    Why is this important? assume you'd normally use the pager provider's web page to send messages. This is very easy to script using curl or several other tools. However, what if the failed service is your internet connection, router or something else that prevents you from reaching the web server and sending the message this way?


    This is where TAP comes to the rescue, since we bypass the network and require only a modem and a working, standard phone line. If both the network connection and the phone line failed at the same time, or worse, the provider's paging system is off-line, then it means a major disaster has struck and any reports about network condition are most likely futile.


    My recommendation would be to get a cell phone that can receive SMS and modify your monitoring scripts so they use your cell phone provider's web page to send messages. Then get a dial up access account, one that doesn't depend on your network being up, and configure things so that, if your main network link is down, your scripts first start a connection on your alternate dial up account, in order to reach your provider's web page and alert you. Another option, one that would only depend on the POTS and your cell phone being operational, would involve rigging the Festival voice synthesizer with mgetty+voice to enable the system to call you on your cell phone directly and deliver the failure message by voice. Still, I think that the redundancy built into the first solution is good enough.

    • Monitor your network connectivity externally, pay for a cheap shell account that will run bigbrother or something. Have that page you if the network goes down. In addition have your network page you via ph#@mobile.att.net e-mail addy, if message != network is down. Or you can get a cheap isp and have your box @ work dial into your isp and if message == network is down, it will dialup and e-mail you via that connection.

  • Go completely analog (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheSHAD0W ( 258774 ) on Monday September 15, 2003 @12:08AM (#6961196) Homepage
    Use a voice modem and call the person's cell phone.

    "Help! Help! The power went out!"

    "Help! Help! Someone is stealing the router!"

    Hopefully, your techs won't think it's Stephen Hawking who needs assistance...

    • Seconded. On Windows, you can do this with the unimodem drivers; it's pretty standard.

      On linux, you're looking at vgetty to do the voice modem stuff, and something like festival to do the speech synth (if you want dynamic messages; if you just want to pre-record a bunch of .voc files and spew them out to the modem, that works too.)

      With vgetty, make sure you get a supported modem; USR is generally a safe bet.

  • If you need reliable messaging, you really want a paging service anyway.

    I've seen text messages sent to a phone take over an hour to be delivered. On multiple carriers.

    And according to this [slashdot.org] article from January, in some places as much as 7.5% of SMS messages fail to be delivered.

    We use SkyTel 2-Way service for our critical paging. They provide delivery status tracking, and since the paging is 2-way, can actually verify that the page was delivered.

    We do use phone messaging as a backup notification

    • well it depends on your paging service....

      i had a pager from smartbeep, it was the greatest thing, $50 covered the beeper and the first years service (w/ tradein of a really old beeper), and it lost about half of the pages i got... never when i was testing it to see if it worked though....

      it was the best thing, cause i didnt' have to lie when i said i didn't get the page until just now :)

  • Some paging providers still offer TAP interfaces, you may just have to switch paging providers. I think we are currently using a TAP interface to send pages to a 'page group' that has all of the NOCish ppl in it so we only have to make one outgoing call to page everyone with UP/DOWNS. IIRC we worked for a while with a Nextel rep and were able to get TAP access for text messaging to Nextel phones, so if you're a Nextel shop you may want to look into that. I don't know if you can get page groups with the N
  • Welcome to gnokii.org gnokii provides tools and a user space driver for use with mobile phones under Linux, various unices and Win32. For a list of supported makes and models take a look at our FAQ pages. With gnokii you can do such things as make data calls, update your address book, change calendar entires, send and receive SMS messages and load ring tones depending on the phone you have.
  • I used to have my system call the pager directly. Add a bunch of waits if your pager has a message like "after the beep, enter your numeric message". Do /not/ use 911 as any part of the message. I must have called 911 about 20 times during initial setup before they called me and said they were sending a car, and I knocked it off.

    Works well though, and just make it a unique numeric page and you'll know exactly what it means.

  • why not something like skytel? i use it and its great via modem or via smtp. especially with the two way paging.
  • Use sprintpcs. They still offer unlimited free tap messaging. E-mail me for the access number if you have trouble finding it on the sprint pcs developer's site.

    Word of caution: we upgraded to sprintpcs after years of using Metrocall. While I like the convenience of having the cell phone, my messaging range is limited inside buildings in ways it never was with a pager. Very infrequently I wish I still used the pager.

    But, since you've been using AT&T, you should be used to it by now.

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