Sending SMS text messages
Sending birthday reminders by SMS
Since I now have a system that is running 24h again, I remembered that I once had my Linux server send me reminders to my mobile phone via modem.
On Linux, I used yaps ("Yet another pager software") to send sms text messages. During the christmas holidays, I set up yaps to send birthday reminders on my new Solaris server.
yaps is free software, see http://freshmeat.net/projects/yaps/ on what it is and where to get it.
You will have to compile it for yourself, but it is easy. To have it run side-by-side with mgetty, I had to change the include file used to determine the lock file name. There seem to be different naming conventions for SysV uucp devide locking. I changed config.h to look like this:
/*
* one of these is required for SysV like lockfiles
*/
# define HAVE_SYS_SYSMACROS_H 0
# define HAVE_SYS_MKDEV_H 1
The default is set to use sysmacros.h instead of mkev.h, which worked for me.
Now
yaps 0172xxxxxxx "30.01 Dirks Birthday"
will remind me of by own birthday..
That's all. A script will call my home-grown "ute" appointment reminder to extract current reminders and invoke yaps if anything's up.
What hardware do you need to be able to send the SMS message and is it costing you for each message you send ?
Posted by Darren Moffat on January 02, 2008 at 01:13 PM CET #
There are gateways provided by the mobile network provdiders, that can be accessed via analogue modems. yaps knows each of these gateways.
With Linux, I used isdn4linux; now I have an old Zyxel Modem to do that besides fax reception. So yes, nowadays, I would call that "special" equipment ;-)
Ciao
Dirk
Posted by Dirk Wriedt on January 02, 2008 at 01:34 PM CET #