[hobbit] External Paging

[Pat Vaughan]

We have a dedicated server that has a serial link directly to our paging
provider that we were using.  Instead of buying the companies paging
client/server software we wrote our own.  I'm currently waiting for an
enhancement to it so I can send longer pages.

Currently, I'm using Email paging, which our pager provider allows. 
Either way, I parse the output of the entire status page with some really
simple shell scripts to deliver more descriptive pages.  I end up with a
generic page that just says "servername.net cpu problem.  ACK Code: xxxx"
for tests where a generic page is appropriate.  For other tests (disk for
instance) I usually just look for the lines that start with "&red" and
scrape the text out of it.

In some of our home written tests, I've started adding lines like
<hobbitpage This is the text to send >.  That way the browsers won't
display it, but it's easy to scrape the text out with a simple script.  It
would be nice if there were some kind of convention for that.

I've started doing the same things for graphing <hobbitgraph 10 20 30>. 
It makes the external scripts to populate the rrd files dirt simple.

Of course, that's no help at all for paging via modem :)  I had setup 
hylafax ( http://www.hylafax.org/ ) in the past.  And it works, but was a
pain to get to work with my provider at the time.  I had to get through to
the right technical resource at the paging company.

I've found that no matter how you end up delivering the pages, the scripts
are mostly the same, it's just a matter of shelling out to execute
whichever program you need to (mailx or sendpage or whatever).


> Hello,
>  I am currently running Hobbit 4.2.1 on Fedora Core 4\Compaq DL380.
> Everything is working great with Hobbit and I'm onto the next step of
> setting up paging using a modem to dial out to our blackberries\cell
> phones.
> I would greatly appreciate any suggestions on how I can get this started
> or
> on how anyone has their paging environment setup.
>  Thanks much,
> bill
>