rasteri's Journal: SMS monitoring

About an hour ago, I found an old Nokia 5130 in a bag under my bed. It gave me an idea for a kind of remote network monitoring system. Basically I hooked the phone up to my workstation via a compatible data cable that I just happened to have lying around, stuck an old PAYG sim card in it, and wrote a little shell script to ping a couple of internet sites and SMS me on my new mobile if neither of them reply.

It now seems to be working pretty well. I've tested it by simply removing the default route from my workstation.

The script checks to see if it's just the Internet or the whole network that's gone down (it pings the Access Point, which should be on 24/7). Only problem is it costs 10p a message, but then again that's more incentive to keep the Internet up I suppose :)