Re: First time user questions

[Peter Grandi]

>>> On Sat, 10 Jul 2004 16:47:21 +0100, Dogsbody <address@hidden>
>>> said:

dan> I really just want to use this setup for SMS so that my machine can
dan> SMS me when something is wrong and I can send reminders/commands to
dan> my self/machine.

There is a even a TELNET-style system that works  over SMS IIRC... You
can run a client on a mobile phone and run a shell into your PC with it.
YMMV.

dan> Q1: The initialisation seems to take quite a while when
dan> communicating with the phone.

I think that's unavoidable. Mobile phones are slow. Their protocols are
not the zippiest.

dan> Q2: I'm sure this is a common question but I can't seem to find a
dan> good answer in the archives.  Obviously I need to get the SMS
dan> messages off the phone, I would like to get them ASAP.

Do a few seconds matter? or even a minute or two? Considering that SMS
messages might be delayed by arbitrary amounts by phone companies
(delays of one hour or more on congested networks are not rare)...

dan> I have looked at smsd but even with the file option I cannot see
dan> any huge advantage of using...
dan>    gnokii --getsms IN 1 -d 2>&1 | /script/that/does/stuff.pl
dan> ... in a cron job.  But even this isn't ideal as it will only deal
dan> with one message a minute and with the initialisation delay it
dan> seems overkill :-\

Again, does a delay of one minute matter? Even if you are in the same
building it could take you more than one minute to react.

But I guess that there are SMS daemons that just connect and stay
connected and read the message periodically. IIRC there are quite a few
SMS daemons around, that gateway both ways between mail and SMS.

If you need just batch operationj, also check 'gammu', it is slightly
more featureful than 'gnokii', and may use slightly faster setup than
'gnokii', or slower; the bottleneck is on the phone though. Check for
links:

  http://WWW.Cihar.com/gammu/

The big thing about 'gnokii' is not 'gnokii' itself, but 'xgnokii',
which is quite nice; while 'gammu' has now got 'wammu', bit I think
'xgnokii' is still nicer). But not relevant to your stuff.

dan> Thank you all very much for a great project, I hope my questions
dan> aren't silly.

Sounds a bit like silly to me :-). The initialization delay is probably
unavoidable, but try looking around for permanently connected gateway
daemons.