Getting text alert when power (and internet) go down?

[Syringer]

I want to set something up where I can get a text message or email if the power goes down at my house since it'll get really hot for my dog.

Since my laptop can be left on I was thinking if the laptop loses internet as a result of the router going down because the power is off. Any suggestions?

 

[Dahak]

I know most ups's have some function to notify you if it goes on battery. Depending on the model will depend on how it will notify you.

Some could have direct network access, some require be connected to a machine via usb

 

[dave_the_nerd]

It's pretty chicken-egg if you lose both power and network connectivity.

I'd almost be tempted to get a little VM hosted offsite and configuring THAT to email/text you if it can't talk to the stuff at your house.

I suppose you could also see if the local power company has outage alerts you could subscribe to.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've looked into how I can send text from a computer and it seems quite complex and did not find much info at all other than using 3rd party services. I imagine if you wanted to pay for a secondary cell service you could have a cell that always stays connected to the network and a special app to send texts from it. This would actually be the best way as even if the internet goes down you'd still get an alert.

But personally I just do email as it's easier. Setup an email account on your phone and setup a different alert sound for when a new email comes in for that account. I use one called K-9 Mail and I just made an alerts585835832572@mydomain.com account (the bunch of random numbers will help prevent spam). Then use a monitoring program on your computer/server and something like an arduino to check power and even UPS battery voltage. The way my setup works is I have a 12v relay powered by a 12v adaptor plugged into the wall (non UPS outlet). When the power goes out, the relay turns off and then the arduino picks that up. The program that runs on the monitoring server simply polls all the I/O pins of the arduino to see if it's 1 or 0.

I ended up writing my own program though but I'm sure some like Nagios can do it. I just found those were a pain to setup, and mine is designed to be super easy to deploy. I still need to tweak it and do some bug fixes but do plan to eventually release it to public.



One major flaw with my system is if my mail server or internet goes down then I don't get any alerts. For the mail server, what I need to do is simply add an option to my program for a slave mail server. Lots of little things like that to add still. Could also have a slave monitoring server that kicks on if it stops being able to communicate with the master. Basically it would send me an alert saying that the monitoring is down.