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From: mao@postgres.berkeley.edu (Mike Olson)
Newsgroups: comp.dcom.telecom
Subject: Re: Alarm Autodialers
Message-ID: <15430@accuvax.nwu.edu>
Date: 15 Dec 90 20:14:17 GMT
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X-Telecom-Digest: Volume 10, Issue 883, Message 5 of 9


In <15409@accuvax.nwu.edu>, Bob Weir notes that environmental monitors
like the Sensaphone are not remotely programmable.  I am moving out of
the domain of telecom, here, but thought you might be interested in a
solution I have used to this problem.

We used a Sensaphone in a computer room that had to be online for
about 48 hours at the end of every month to print bills and paychecks.
During the 48 hours, a sequence of programs ran on a tight timeline --
they took about 45 hours to run, so any delays were a major problem.

We bought a Sensaphone, pulled the speaker out of a terminal connected
to one of our computers, and wrote a daemon program that would watch
the active process table and compare it to a list that we prepared of
what should be going on at any time.  The speaker wires were connected
to one of the three "external alarm sensor" inputs on the Sensaphone.
If anything funny happened, the daemon program would ring the terminal
bell, the Sensaphone would trigger, and the operations staff would get
woken up by the Sensaphone's voice synthesizer reporting that ALARM
CONDITION ONE EXISTS ALARM CONDITION ONE EXISTS.

We could generally dial up and fix whatever was broken (although
groggy naked programmers making software changes to production code at
3AM did give my boss the screaming heebie-jeebies).  For under a
hundred bucks, this Rube Goldberg solution was a major win.  We went
from an average of 1.5 days late to 0.5 hours early with the end of
month-end processing.

Granted, we didn't make the Sensaphone itself remotely programmable,
but with a cheap computer and a screwdriver you can pull off some
pretty remarkable things.


Mike