NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #1/NN_1993_1.iso/spool/comp/sys/novell/11052

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-04 | 3.6 KB

Path: sparky!uunet!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!linac!pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu!ohstpy!glazer
From: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: comp.sys.novell
Subject: Re: Pager server alert?DEREGISTER
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 4 Jan 93 09:14:39 EST
References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
Organization: The Ohio State University, Department of Physics
Lines: 69

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Kevin Wang (The Scarecrow)) writes:
>>My employers have recently given me a pager (I know, lucky me) so that
>>users in our department can reach me if there is a problem with the LAN.
>>The pager is triggered by dialing the local phone number assigned to it,
>>then dialing the number that should appear on the pager's display.
>>
>>I would like to set up an automated device to page me if one of my servers
>>goes down.  I have an old XT and an old autodialing modem.  What I need is
>>a program that would run on the XT and watch the server connections.  When
>>a server goes down, the program would send the command sequence to the
>>modem: ATDT1234567,,,,9999999#.  Viola!  I could put the XT on a cheap UPS
>>so it would even call me if there was a power failure.
>>
>>Does such a program exist?  If not, how hard would it be to write?  (I
>>have precious little programming experience.)  Any and all help or
>>suggestions will be much appreciated.

I have not seen such a program commercially but I ran into the same dilemma.
We have Alphanumeric pagers that I wanted to do about what you mention.  I also
wanted to link them to the email system (pegasys mail) so we can easily send
messages.  This is what I came up with (and it is not sooo complex)...

First I wrote a small Procomm script that would send a message based on a file.
The file has the format

phone number
pager id(s) - comma delimitted
message

Once I had this working, I wrote a Pascal program that uses a few Novell APIs
to

1. Turn off broadcast messaging.
2. Listen for new broadcast messages (PMAIL sends a broadcast message to the
recipient of new mail..so does CHARON).  This triggers my program to look for
new mail in its mail directory.
3. Get any new mail and convert it to the pager file described above.  The
subject of the mail has the pager id(s)--actually it has pager names w/ a table
to translate them to their ids.
4. Then it fires off PROCOMM to process the message.
5. Finally it looks for new mail before scanning broadcast messages again and
returnning to #2.

To get the system to notify me of the server going down, I have it running on
it's own pc (Yea, 4MHZ).  When the server goes down, it's scan for broadcast
messages times out.  Then it automatically sends a message like "SERVER DOWN"
to all pagers in the table.

Since this system is EMAIL based, it was quite easy to write a couple
additional utilities (run on another system) that automatically sends email if

- a printer goes down
- a printer is jammed
- power outage detected.  For this one, I simply check for the existance of a
couple of machines that are not on UPS.  In this case, we have netports
controlling the printers thoughout the building.  If the netports suddenly all
vanish...power outage.

We only have one novell server, however, it should be quite obvious that if you
simply run SLIST to a file periodically and check the file for others servers,
you should be able to detect other down servers.

If you want any additional pointers, please let me know.  I can make my
programs available if you truely desire them (kinda hashed together at
present).

Jon