Automated System Administrator's Pager
David Dykes
See Sidebar 1
See Sidebar 2
Many system administrators are familiar with pagers.
These inexpensive
electronic leashes allow users to reach you anytime,
anywhere for
better or worse. Most often it is for worse, because
when your users
resort to paging you, something has usually gone awry.
One way to leverage this wireless technology, and perhaps
remove some of
the tension from being paged, is by enabling the systems
themselves to
page the administrator. Not only does this allow the
administrator to
receive system messages without being tethered to a
console, but it may
allow for more proactive responses to warnings rather
than corrective
responses to user complaints. For example, it would
be preferable to
have a daemon page you with a low disk space warning
than a user page
you complaining that he or she can't save a file.
Fortunately, today's alphanumeric (alpha) pagers are
inexpensive and use
a standardized protocol that make this functionality
relatively
straightforward and cheap to implement. In this article,
I propose ASAP
(Automated System Administrator's Pager) as a possible
means of adding
this connectivity. The article covers how ASAP works,
the specifics of
implementation, and some potential applications of this
connectivity.
Some specific OS-dependent examples are given in the
context of a UNIX
environment, but the real core of this system should
be generalizable to
almost any operating system.
How does it work?
ASAP is simply a couple of scripts that act as a gateway
from Internet
mail (i.e., SMTP) to an alpha pager. The first script,
asap.pl, is a
Perl script that parses SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol)
message
headers and then creates (or appends to) a "TAP
friendly" spool file
(see sidebar on The TAP Protocol).
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