Path: menudo.uh.edu!usenet From: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer) Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews Subject: REVIEW: CyberPager 1.2 Followup-To: comp.sys.amiga.datacomm Date: 18 Jan 1994 18:22:42 GMT Organization: The Amiga Online Review Column - ed. Daniel Barrett Lines: 198 Sender: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu (comp.sys.amiga.reviews moderator) Distribution: world Message-ID: <2hh9di$sk5@menudo.uh.edu> Reply-To: mwm@contessa.phone.net (Mike Meyer) NNTP-Posting-Host: karazm.math.uh.edu Keywords: paging, telecommunications, freeware PRODUCT NAME CyberPager 1.2 BRIEF DESCRIPTION CyberPager is a package that uses a standard (slow) modem to dial a paging service and send pages to your pager. A pager capable of displaying alphanumeric data is very useful. AUTHOR/COMPANY INFORMATION Name: Christopher A. Wichura Address: 5450 East View Park Chicago, Il. 60615 USA Telephone: +1 312 684-2941 Email: caw@miroc.chi.il.us BIX: caw LIST PRICE CyberPager is freeware. SPECIAL HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE REQUIREMENTS HARDWARE Your Amiga needs a modem. You need a pager, but it doesn't need to be attached to the computer. SOFTWARE Requires AmigaDOS 2.0 or later, and OwnDevUnit.library 2.1 or better (version 3.3 is included with the distribution). COPY PROTECTION None. MACHINE USED FOR TESTING A3000 running AmigaDOS 3.0 and 3.1, 16 Meg of FAST ram, 2 Meg of chip, and either a 1 or 2 Meg PicassoII for display. The modems used were an Supra 2400Z internal modem, and a Telebit Worldblazer attached to either the A3000 serial port, or one of the serial ports of a GVP IO Extender card. REVIEW While the idea of having your computer send you pages automatically, with no human involved, may seem repulsive - especially if you already have a pager - that's the wrong way to look at this particular piece of software. Instead, consider that it gives your computer an output device that isn't attached to the computer, and could allow it to print useful information even if you are on the other side of the country. For instance, I wake up in the morning in a hotel room, and my appointments for the day are on my pager. I get early notification of meetings from my calendar manager - even though I'm nowhere near my computer. Of course, you can also use this to improve the accuracy and speed of notification of important events. Network outages, critical computers being down, or just important pieces of mail can all be used to trigger pages. With a pager that can display ASCII characters, the pages can actually say what's wrong, instead of being a number you have to decipher. With that out of the way, we can discuss with the actual software. In installing it, there are three files that have to be set up. They are: Config The configuration for this installation. Services A list of pager services that you can dial. Aliases A list of people who can be sent pages. In addition, you can create: Groups Allows pages to be sent to multiple people with one command. Config is straightforward, and the first part resembles the Amiga UUCP config file. It's a list of variable names and values representing the name of the page spooling directory, location of the log file, and similar configuration variables. The second half of the file is a list of modems. These are numbered by hand and include a serial device driver to use, the unit number for that device, the baud rate to open the modem, whether the modem has to be dialed at the speed the service expects for connection, whether the modem supports CTS/RTS handshaking, and finally, the string that is used to dial the modem. Services is probably the hardest file to configure, because the information in it isn't liable to be readily available, and you will have to find the person at your pager service company who knows it. Such information includes the number for your computer to call to send a page, the maximum baud rate, the maximum page size in bytes, and whether or not the service supports multiblock pages. Generally, the answer to that last question is "it doesn't matter." Blocks are a maximum of approximately 240 characters, and pages are a maximum of approximately 230, so the longest possible page fits in one block anyway. Given that information, the Aliases file is easy. It's the name of the person to whom you'll be sending pages, the name of the company listed in Services that is providing pager service for them, the "PIN" number for the pager -- just that pager's phone number, for the services I use -- and whether that person wants a maximum number of pages/messages, or a maximum page size lower than the service limit. Once this is all set up, you can arrange to send a page with the "Spoolpage" command. You tell it to whom (from the "aliases" file) to send the page, whether the message is urgent, and the message itself. Spoolpage copies it out to the spool directory. You now run the "dialixo" command. It will check each service to see if there are pages waiting for that service. If there are, it'll dial the service (from the "Services" file) and deliver all waiting pages. The service then pages you... but be patient. Paging services have a delay, ranging from nearly nothing to as long as 20 minutes! Clearly, to be useful, you need to arrange for the dialixo command to be run at regular intervals, with retries and the like. Since dialixo doesn't do anything if there are no pages, it's safe to run fairly frequently. Some form of "cron" (scheduler) utility is just the ticket, though something based on the AmigaDOS 2.0 Notify functionality might be better. At the same time, arranging to have the log file trimmed at regular intervals is probably a good idea. You normally look at that only when things go wrong, which is a rare event. Once everything is set up, there is a selection of scripts that allow you to set up your address so electronic mail can be sent to your pager; watch log files for interesting events to send pages on; watch for incoming news; or to page someone chosen from a schedule. DOCUMENTATION The documentation is a a single file with the distribution, describing the system, its theory of operation, and what little is required to set it up. LIKES AND DISLIKES The program comes with full source code - always a major plus in my book! The documentation could use some work, especially to cover configuring the system for multiple modems. In fact, the support for multiple modems could be made a bit easier to deal with. COMPARISON TO OTHER SIMILAR PRODUCTS The only similar product for the Amiga is an unreleased VLT (terminal emulator) script I wrote myself. This package has all the features I would have liked to have added, and is much faster and more reliable to boot. BUGS None that weren't fixed quickly. VENDOR SUPPORT Excellent. WARRANTY None. CONCLUSIONS This product is excellent, if poorly documented. I've been using it for months, and it does the job expected of it with no fuss, no bother, and no headaches on my part. Kudos to CAW for providing this tool. COPYRIGHT NOTICE Copyright 1993, Mike W. Meyer --- Daniel Barrett, Moderator, comp.sys.amiga.reviews Send reviews to: amiga-reviews-submissions@math.uh.edu Request information: amiga-reviews-requests@math.uh.edu Moderator mail: amiga-reviews@math.uh.edu Anonymous ftp site: math.uh.edu, in /pub/Amiga/comp.sys.amiga.reviews