Watching over SMS gw

Sat 12th June 2004 20:23 EEST

Some friends of mine got this pretty amazing idea of an amateur rally event - Paska-G's Sprint. The idea is to drive a car that costs less than 200 Euros to the Hammerfest, Norway and back again. It goes without saying that cars in this budget have a nasty tendency to break down on you. The sprint also included some funny tasks to be accomplished, like swimming in the sea and reading poetry.

To raise the geek factor on the event, the Nemein boyz set up an SMS gateway that could be used to log events of the five participating teams. Each team could send SMS messages that would display online at the Sprint site. Since I was not going to participate in the race I volunteered to watch over the gateway.

Everything went well for the Friday evening and all the messages came through sooner or later. However, during the night the gateway had crashed and I had to run to the office in the morning to boot it. Later in Saturday I was about to go out with my dog when the gateway had crashed again. So I took Dora with me to boot the gw. To add insult to the injury, I didn't even make it back home before the gw was down again.

So, this time I had to boot the Ericsson's handset in addition to the gateway software and now everything seems to be running nicely... for now...