$Id: README.paging,v 1.1.1.1 2004/06/09 05:18:06 trockij Exp $

SO YOU WANT MON TO PAGE YOU??
-----------------------------

SOFTWARE

It's not the job of mon to page you, but it *does* have the
responsibility of triggering an alert program, which can page
you.

Paging via modem is probably the best way to handle notification,
since phone systems usually fail much less than local (and wide)
area networks. Think of it as "out-of-band" notification.

QuickPage
    mon ships with a wrapper for QuickPage, which uses a modem
    to send an alphanumeric page via the IXO/TAP/SNPP (what is
    it today???) protocol. QuickPage is very simple to configure,
    supports groups, runs on a number of platforms, and is free.

    The latest version of QuickPage can be found at
    ftp.it.mtu.edu:/pub/QuickPage.

Tpage
    Originally maintained by Tom Limoncelli (of INN FAQ fame),
    tpage was one of the earliest paging progmrams. It doesn't
    seem to be very well maintained recently, but it's worth
    having a look at. It supports multiple users and an "on call"
    schedule (which mon can already do), but its probably
    worth looking at anyway. It's mostly written in Perl.

    The last time I looked (Tue Sep 16 09:49:18 PDT 1997),
    I was not able to locate tpage-2.40.tar.gz :(

    Have a look at the IXO FAQ for more information, supposedly
    available from ftp://ftp.airnote.net/pub/paging-info/ixo.faq


EMAIL PAGING

If your paging company allows you to send pages via electronic
mail, you can use the "netpage.alert" script that comes with
mon. It just calls sendmail and fires off email to one or more
addresses with a specially formatted subject line that should
give maximum information in your pager's tiny alpha LCD.

To format a page nicely on a tiny LCD, you may have to play with end
of line characters. For example, pagenet pagers seem to ignore any EOL
sequences other than just a plain \r

A reminder--you might not want to rely on the network to send
you a message if the network is down :)
