[geeks] Paging software?

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Alois Hammer wrote:

> Probably for this reason -- and for many less good ones -- corporate
> security has placed an absolute ban on the use of IM.

So:

   1) You can't use IM.
   2) Email is unreliable.
   3) You haven't the budget for a modem/server setup and many of the
      telcos have stopped offering dialup pager/SMS gateways.

You, sir, have an intractable problem!

Point out what you need (either #1 or get the company to buy-out your
admins' cellco plans and get them all on the same network AND buy
whatever "enterprise" account is necessary to do the group SMS thing
in-house), and why you need it.  Document your meeting with a copy of
your evidence, and file it under "no longer my problem".

If the suits do the right thing, great!  Problem solved.

If the suits don't do the right thing, reliable email delivery isn't
important enough to bother them, so it shouldn't bother you.

Now, if you have slightly more than zero budget (whereby I mean, you can
scrounge up some old otherwise-decommissioned hardware), you may want to
try building a tiny mail server running something extremely lightweight
and reliable (I recommend Postfix on OpenBSD) that does Nothing But send
SMS messages to the email-to-SMS gateways.  It doesn't go through
relays, it doesn't receive mail for local users, it doesn't do mail
forwarding; it just talks to the SMS gateways for the purpose of sending
messages.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke | "There is no such thing as a short of reserves...
Elgin, TX         |  one bank can have a problem...the Fed can print
USA               |  money, there is no shortage."
.                 |     --Jim Glassman, US Economist, JPMorgan Chase