29. 03. 2019 Charles Callaway Cloud, NetEye

SMS Notifications by Bridging Ethernet and Serial with Moxa’s NPort

Monitoring needs to take place wherever data is collected, which may not always be right next to your NetEye server. If you have poor signal reception, or else you’re running on a virtual machine, and you need 24×7 availability, notification via SMS may be the only option. Sometimes you just can’t run a serial cable to your server.

In such cases you should take a look at NetEye’s solution that bridges the modem’s serial cable to a standard cabled Ethernet network. Based on the Moxa Nport 6100 series, it creates a bidirectional gateway between the SMS modem and either the Internet or a private LAN. Thus important notifications go from NetEye, through Moxa, through the modem, and to your phone.

Setting up the hardware is easy. Instead of connecting the modem directly to your physical server with a serial cable, connect the modem to one end of the Moxa device and an Ethernet cable to the other end. The Ethernet connection can be directly connected to the server, to a switch on your private LAN, or directly to the internet.

Once that’s done, you can configure the software for all three components:

Moxa: Connect via TCP from your NetEye machine. Moxa allows configuration via either Telnet or a browser. It involves setting the IP, a user name and password. That’s it.
NetEye: Install and configure the npreals and smsd systemd services, then test the bridged connection.
Modem: Nothing! Modem configuration is entirely done in NetEye with the smsd service.

Once the setup is done, you’re ready to test that you can send an SMS with the appropriately named smssend script. Don’t forget to put the SIM card’s PIN in the configuration.

That’s it! You can now integrate SMS notifications into your NetEye configuration. We’ve written an entire How To in NetEye 4.5 if you’re interested, just go to User Guide > Initial Configuration > SMS Gateway Connection.