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Seven months on SF, and my first question. I do hope someone has an answer, as I'm at my wits' end.

I have a Nokia 6310i connected via RS232 cable to a Solaris 10 system, for sending SMS messages from NAGIOS using smstools3. It works fairly well, but over time people have started to really enjoy the convenience of SMS notification, and the number of messages sent has crept up from 2-3 a day to 30-100 a day, and the GSM phone solution isn't really up to that: every few days it goes unresponsive, starts failing to send messages, etc. My inclination is to get a GSM modem and use that instead, but there are no longer any RS232 GSM modems that I can find, so I have to use a USB one instead. Solaris' documentation is poor on precision about which USB modems it can talk to; it says all modems that honour "Universal Serial Bus Communication Device Class Abstract Control Model (USB CDC ACM) specification" are OK, but I can't find a single modem manufacturer who knows anything about that spec.

I would value any recommendations, positive or negative, anyone can make about USB GSM modems on Solaris; SMS-related recommendations are extra-useful, but I'm keen to know anything. Failing that, recommendations for Linux-compatible ones would be useful, as it's somewhere to start.

Thanks for any light anyone can shed.

MadHatter
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1 Answers1

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It's getting "too localized" here, but anyway:

http://www.coniugo.com/ still offer RS232-capable GSM modems. I bought a USB version from Conrad, and I guess they ship to the UK.

Beside that, maybe it's possible to use a web based SMS service for your normal notifications and use the Nokia exclusively for Nagios notifications (so Nagios will reach you when the network is down).

Sven
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  • Thanks for that, Sven. I should have made it clear that **all** my SMS notifications are NAGIOS-related ones, and thus need to go out via a direct-attach device. My users loved being "in touch" with the state of their apps much more than I had expected them to. I will investigate your other pointers immediately! – MadHatter May 04 '11 at 08:59
  • Conrad have a UK arm, conrad-uk.com, and I have ordered one of the quadband GSM modems from them. I'll try to remember to come back and update this question with confirmation that it works in practice, but I figure that you've satisfied the criteria for an ACCEPT - thank you! – MadHatter May 04 '11 at 09:56
  • Just as a follow-up, I got a Coniugo GSM modem, and it works brilliantly. If anyone else does this, do remember that they need an external power supply **and** an external antenna (mine had an MMCX connector) to work. – MadHatter Jun 13 '11 at 13:55