Thought for an alert

[Jason Branscum]

Hey Guys (in a non-gender sort of way, of course)

I had an interesting thought this morning but have been quite unsuccessful
in finding ways to go about this.

The scenario:

You are a small business hosting a website customers connect to, one
internet connection to a local uplink provider, one router handling all
this traffic.  This is a pretty common scenario; Most small business don't
use BGP or failover connectivity.. heck, some of my customer use DSL to do
major hosting.  Your nagios server is located on-site and is set to send
SMS messages when a host goes down.

The disaster:

The above scenario has two points of failure (PoF), the Internet router
and the Internet link itself (a T1 in this case).  One night, tragicly,
your T1 line goes down as someone installs a new fence in their backyard
and cuts right through a cable mistaken for a tree root with their rented
backhoe (sound famiallier anyone).  Your nagios server tries to alert you
but is unable to because of the link being down.  Customers are furious
and you're sound asleep dreaming about profits.

The fix:

I'd like to investigate using a unix machine (or Win32 if I _had_ to) that
I can order to Dial a cell phone, Speak a message "Link to SOMEISP down,
help!" or even the standard nagios host-notify out of misccommands.cfg and
then hang-up.  Wouldn't that be neat?  Right now, I have Zetron's that can
do this, they'll wake me up in the middle of the night to tell me the
power is out a a tower site but have no computer interface.

Usually googling will come up with answers on any subject but frankly I am
stumped and cannot find any help for this over the internet.  Something
tells me I have a long road ahead of me but my perl skills are up and
prepared to code anything I need.  What I'd like from ya'll is any kind of
programs you know (unix preferably) that will use SAPI (text to speech)
and/or dial-out scripts that will allow audio input.  If nothing else, I
can record the .WAV files myself (although it would be messy) and have
said dialer call a cell phone and play pre-recorded messages.. which is
why SAPI or the like is preferable.. you give SAPI some text and it says
it (in a robotish voice) rather than having 100 megs of WAV files sitting
dormant.

Any help would rock the casbah!  If I actually come up with anything wprth
using, I'll be happy to share.

Jason


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