SMS alerts My how-to

[Kyriacos Sakkas]

Hi all,
    This is my quick and dirty way od doing SMS alerts. I anybody ccan  
sugest improvments or a   better way, let me know. ( I will point out a 
couple of what I consider problem spots).

    First the System : Dell Optiplex GX270 running Debian Testing Kernel 
2.4.27.
    Siemens S55 phone conected via serial port (ttyS0), phone will 
change, as this is my        personal mobile phone...
    I am using only oficial debs for this.
    Software : Nagios 1.2, gsm-utils, libgsmme1c102.
       From gsm-utils I use the gsmsendsms command to do the actuall SMS 
sending.

Now the dirty work:
(creation a notification method by using gsmsendsms as part of the 
actual notify command didn't work)
So,
1. Create a script that can transfer file contents to gsmsendsms:
Script name smsspool.sh placed in /usr/local/scripts/ although this is a 
personal choice.
Actual Script below-----------
#!/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/scripts

for i in /var/spool/sms/sms*
do
num=`cut -d @ -f 2 $i`
msg=`cut -d @ -f 1 $i`
/usr/bin/gsmsendsms -b 9600 -d /dev/mobilephone $num "$msg"
logger "SMS Message Send to: $num"
rm -f $i
done

exit 0
Script end-------------
As you can see this script uses a spool directory. This needs to be rw 
to nagios(or globally).
Now, getting nagios to create a spooled sms:
In misccommands.cfg (in /etc/nagios/ for my setup) I defined an new 
notification method,(two actually, service and host, but currently they 
are exactly the same)
Here is the notificaton command---------
define command{
        command_name    notify-by-sms
        command_line    /usr/bin/printf "%b" "$NOTIFICATIONTYPE$: 
$HOSTNAME$: $SERVICEDESC$ is $SERVICE STATE$ ($OUTPUT$)@$CONTACTPAGER$"  
 > /var/spool/sms/sms`date +%d%m%Y%H%M%S%N`
        }
End of notification command------
Now all that is left is getting smsspool.sh to scan that directory 
periodicaly, a perfect job for cron :

*  *    * * *   root    /usr/local/scripts/smsspool.sh

Now the setup is complete, and nagios can bother you in the middle of 
the nigh abou anything it feels like...

So, this works, but I have a small problem which,  to be frank is not 
very importand, but its being a busy day, so if somenoe can tell me what 
I missed, I'd be gratefull...
Problem : As you can see I use the logger command, in my script, in 
order to get something miningfull in my syslog, in case I need to check 
on whats going on. Problem is that even when there are no files in the 
spool directory the for loop is entered, generating unnesesary log traffic:

Oct 21 17:36:05 localhost logger: SMS Message Send to:

If there is a simple solution, that would solve this while not getting 
the script too complex,
I would like to know... I'm sure its something simple (a while loop? - 
cant figure out a _simple_ way to hand it a file list as a condition), 
but it's got me stuck for now.

So, thanks in advance for any feedback,

Kyriacos Sakkas




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