TPAGE

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

The program wants 4 things: (1) the phone number to dial, (2) the person's PIN pin (Personal Identification Number), (3) who to email if the page isn't accepted, and (4) the message.

Once it has all that information, it dumps it into a file which is read by

tpaged which delivers the message to the paging service using the appropriate protocol. tpaged selects the correct program for you. Each protocol is implemented as a separate program. Currently ixocico is the only program to choose from, and it implements

the IXO protocol.

The phone

number (1) and PIN (2) can be specified with the

-d and -p options, OR by specifying a name (which instructs tpage to look up the information in the pager table file), OR by

specifying the name ``-'' which means ``whoever is on duty'' (which instructs tpage to find out who is on duty from the schedule file, and then look up their phone number and PIN in the pager table file).

Specifying a phone number without a PIN (or vice-versa) results in the missing data being looked up in the pager table file.

A comma-separated list of names may be given. It is much more efficient to use a list of names than to do single pages.

NOTE: A name must always be specified, so if you use the -d and -p options you must also specify a name (such as ``foo'') which will be ignored. Combining a list of names with the -d and/or -p options works in a logical but undefined manner.

To specify who to email if there is a problem (3) use the -e option. The default for this is to not send email to anyone.

The message (4) can be specified on the command line or if ``-'' is given, stdin is read for the message. No matter how many bytes you give it, the high-bit is stripped, RETURNs and TABs are turned into spaces, and groups of spaces are turned into single spaces. The first 160 bytes (configurable in the program) is all that's sent, since that's all that the pager will display.

Command-line options are:

-T table file

table file is the file that has the table of people and the info needed to communicate with their pager. The default is /home/adm/lib/tpage/table.

-S schedule file

schedule file is the file that has the is the file that is used to find out who's on duty at this moment. This file is only consulted if ``who'' is ``-''. The default is /home/adm/lib/tpage/schedule.

-U

This option marks the message as urgent. If the schedule lists that no one is on duty at that time but the message is marked urgent, a secondary schedule is consulted.

-d phone num

Ignore what the table file says, use this phone number when dialing. If a list of people is specified, this phone number is used for the first person, the others will be looked up in the -T file.

-p pin

Ignore what the table file says, use this PIN when transmitting the message. If a list of people is specified, this phone number is used for the first person, the others will be looked up in the -T file.

-t

Act as a ``tee''. Copy stdin to stdout. If you give this option and the message is not coming from

-v

Verbose mode. Currently useless since there isn't anything extra worth printing.

-m

Parse the input as mail. Skip all the headers but extract the ``From'', ``Subject'', and ``Priority'' lines. If they exist, append to the beginning of the message ``F: frominfo'', ``S: subject line'', ``P: priority''. ``F:'' and ``P:'' are clipped to be one screenful in length. They are all padded out to the end of the screen.

-M

Skip ``mail quoted'' lines. Netnews and Mail often have other messages quoted by prefixing each line with greater than symbol. This option skips any input line that begins with zero or more whitespace charactors, followed by zero or more letters or numbers, followed by zero or more of <, >, {, or }. This should catch the normal quoting methods as well as anything the perverse superquote.el package

for GNU Emacs might come up with.

-e

On error, send email to this person. If any errors happen when the tpage command is beign run, the user is notified. This is for sending email when the page is being processed. In other words, if the PIN is incorrect. If the phone number is incorrect the tpaged daemon will keep redialing and redialing it trying to figure out why it can't get through.

tpaged tpage is a program that you don't need to know about. Your sysadmin should have installed it for you. It wakes up about every 20 seconds, sees if there are any new messages to send out and tries to send them. It can understand multiple paging protocols (tpage picks the best one for you) though it currently only knows about the IXO protocol. tpage can run as ``root'' but is often just run as ``daemon''.

ixocico is the message transport program for the tpage system. It is called by tpaged and told what device to use and what phone number to dial on the command line. It gets the PINs and messages to send from stdin.

It co-exists with the uucp programs fine as it uses the same methods to lock the modems. It notices stale locks and blows them away. Not all locking features have been proven to work on HPUX, only SunOS. It will not wait for a modem to be unlocked.

tpaged watches the output of ixocico for lines beginning with # to know success or failure of particular messages and of the entire batch.

FILES

/home/adm/lib/tpage/scheduleschedule of who's on duty
/home/adm/lib/tpage/tabletable of people and their pager info

SEE ALSO

HISTORY

BUGS

It currently only compiles under SunOS even though some defines are inserted so that it doesn't fail all over the place on silly operating systems like HPUX.

Index

NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

FILES

SEE ALSO

HISTORY

BUGS