Paging Dr Pager...Paging Dr Pager...

[kallistii]

Well, for being an on-call System Administrator, you need a way for the problem reporting system to contact you. Now, most systems don't call you on your cell phone...although with Asterisk, the free telephony software, and any of the zillion of text-to-speech programs, they should be able to, but send you a text message. Most cell providers used to have an email to sms service...but many of them have been shut down. And if they do work, the time it takes can be anywhere from a few minutes, to a few hours. Some also offer the ability to receive email on your phone...but my service provider, Fido, can't seem to make it work on my phone. So, I needed to go and get a pager.

Everyone is getting out of the page busines it seems. I guess these days, only pimps and computer people on call use them.

So, off I got to Bayshore, where they have at least one of each type of wireless telecom company's representative. Fido doesn't have any pagers. I can't find a Telus booth. So I got to Rogers. After waiting about 5 minutes while the two salesmen talk to two different large breasted women, both with lowcut shirts on...I interrupt one and ask what info they have on pagers...they don't do pagers, you have to go over the The Source, where they sell Rogers pagers. So, off I went.

The Source only have one pager...and the salesman had to go and dig for it in the back room. And it was only numeric, and I need an alphanumeric one.

Now I am down to the bottom of the barrel...Bell.

Off to the upscalators I go, and enter the Bell Canada Store. They only have one...it's in the back, and the salesperson has to dig for it. It's only numeric. I figure, it's all I am going to get, and I buy it...but make sure that I can return it.

After spending a half hour trying to get out of Bayshore, I finally make it to the Queensway, and get Terry Fox drive, where their is another The Source. According to the Rogers catalogue, they do have alphanumeric pagers, and maybe this location will have one. So I go in, and yes, they have an alphanumeric pager. It's a tiny thing, all silver, and kind of cheaply put together. Runs on one AAA battery. So I buy that, and will return to the Bell Store, maybe after Christmas.

At work, I call up Rogers to activate the pager...and guess what? It's not alphanumeric! It displays both for set up and such, but it will not receive alphanumeric pages! So, I have a long talk with the rep from Rogers, and she can rent me a pager with all the features I need for about $25 a month...as I don't have to pay it (well, I do, but I get reimbused for the full cost), I think this is the best deal. That evening, I return the Rogers pager to The Source.

Monday, I am supposed to receive the pager at home.

As one person somewhere along the line suggested, I should have just have gotten a Blackberry!

ttyl

Comments

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

I'd bet that the Blackberry wouldn't receive "paging" messages either.

Is there any way that a reliable "alert" message of some kind could be transmitted into the SMS system in general? Or is SMS itself not reliable?

[pistolpup.livejournal.com]

Most people these days tend to use Cell phones for that. At my last job, they still relied on good old pagers and the cell phone was to call back on since up in the hills of NC, there wasn't much service with SMS texting. PDA phones with SMS are the next wave. There are also companies like "AlarmPoint" that offer paging systems for voice paging with confirmation. I'd have a look at them and see if you can't get Astericks to do something similar. It makes it easy for a call center to page out to a list on cell phones with several methods, numbers, etc and if you don't reach the primary on call, go down the list. Quite a handy tool to have so that you can get away from the good old pagers. SMS is the next best option. The other nice thing is with a decent cell plan, you can tether the phone and get usable speeds into the systems at work. Even using something as bulky as Citrix (VNC like) to run remote desktops works. VPN is preferred so you don't have to send the graphics data though. Glad to here things are picking back up for ya and hope the pager stays quiet at night :)