A: All released versions of RamPage were fully
compliant with Year 2000 requirements. The initial design of RamPage included
the use of OpenVMS 64-bit internal time representation, which is suitable for
storing and processing any date between November 17,1858 (the Smithsonian base
date for the astronomical calendar) and December 31, 9999.
A Postscript version of the Year 2000 Software Compliancy Statement
for RamPage is included in all distribution kits. The file for this document is
SYS$RAMPAGE:YEAR2000.PS.
Top
Q: What wireless carrier providers can I use?
A: Due to its customizable design, RamPage works with all carrier services,
including those that interpret the standard wireless messaging protocols differently from
other carriers.
Ergonomic Solutions does not endorse one carrier service over another. When
shopping for wireless service, you should consider all the same factors you would
if you were shopping for mobile phone service. After all, there are many
factors in common, such as air-time plans, coverage areas, and charges for
extra features.
You should also take into consideration how you plan to integrate messaging into
your environment. Will you be sending more messages each month than are
offered in standard air-time packages? Will you typically be sending long
messages that some carriers don't allow, or charge extra fees for? Will you
be sending lots of messages at peak carrier air-times, and if so, what is the
expected broadcast delay? Does the carrier offer special group billing rates?
And don't forget the real power behind RamPage... you can dispatch one message
to many mobile devices, even if they are on different carriers. Therefore, you don't
need to commit all of your air-time expenditures to a single carrier. You can
mix and match services based on your requirements. For example, you may choose
one carrier for nationwide coverage, and another for regional coverage.
Top
Q: How can I find my carrier's dial-up access number?
A:Our support staff maintains an in-house directory of carriers' access
numbers, but we have no way to ensure complete accuracy. You should contact customer service at your carrier for this
information. Your carrier may refer to this number as either the
(1) ALPHAMATE access number, (2) TAP access number, or (3) TAP port number.
Verify that the service representative is providing you with the same telephone
number that would be used for an Alphamate Page Entry Terminal, and
not a touch-tone access number specific to your mobile device.
As further confirmation, dial the given phone number from a standard telephone.
You should hear a high-pitched modem answer tone, and not a
beep-beep-beep or other audible tone or voice prompt.
You should also take this opportunity to ask for the carrier's maximum message
length, and the required data communications parameters. Most carriers
communicate at either (1) 7-bits, even parity, 300 baud, or (2) 8 bits, no
parity, 2400 baud.
Top
Q: How many characters can I enter in a message?
A: The number of characters in a message is dependent upon the limits
defined by your carrier service. RamPage defaults to the very conservative
character limit of 20 characters when you define a new carrier using the
Carrier Database Utility. Twenty characters is about right only for
numbers-only pagers.
Basic SMS services generally offer up to 60, and TAP services offer 240 characters in a
message. These 'magic numbers' are derived from the industry standard
protocols, where a message transaction is composed of a data blocks. For TAP, 256
characters. In these blocks, up to 16 characters are reserved as
header, trailer, and checksum data. If your carrier permits multi-block TAP
transactions, then the limit is usually a multiple of 256 characters.
If your carrier service supports TAP with less than 240 characters per message, you can
enable RamPage's message Segmentation feature, which splits your message
into consecutive message transactions. For example, if your carrier's limit is
100 characters and you send a 350 character message, RamPage transmits three
messages of 100 characters each, and a fourth message with the remaining 50
characters.
If your carrier supports more than 240
characters per message, then RamPage's segmentation feature constructs as many
multi-block TAP transactions as necessary for the length of your message. Even
though multiple blocks are transmitted, these extended length services usually
result in a single air wave broadcast.
You should familiarize yourself with your carrier's message length
policies, since some air-time subscription plans charge extra fees if you
exceed your monthly message limit or your message character limit.
If you are sending the same message to multiple mobile devices using different carrier
services, and you have not enabled the message segmentation feature for a given
carrier, then RamPage truncates your message to that carrier's maximum length.
This means that some people may receive your complete message, while others may
not.
Top
Q: Can I send text messages to my mobile phone, Palm,
or PDA?
A: Most mobile phones now use digital signals which include text messaging service.
If you have an analog mobile phone, some are capable of turning on paging capabilities
for a subscription fee from your provider. In either case, you can
send messages just like you would to a normal pager, and your mobile phone number
is used as the PIN in the RamPage Database.
The same is true for your Palm or PDA if it has a built-in receiver for text messaging.
If it doesn't, you can often add this capability by installing a pager card or
similar electronics that are offered or endorsed by the manufacturer.
Top
Q: Do I need a Pager-Based or System-Based RamPage License?
A: The Pager-Based License is the required type for nearly all RamPage
installations, which permits you to dispatch wireless messages from all
computers in one location, regardless of platform.
System-Based Licenses are provided only for legacy support of true OpenVMS
timesharing enviroments. To qualify for a System-Based License, the following
conditions must be met:
Q: Do I have to use the modem supplied with RamPage?
A: Yes, but not because Ergonomic Solutions is in the business of
selling modems. In fact, we don't sell these modems at all to our customers.
They remain as part of
our equipment-in-the-field inventory. We provided for your use with
each dial-up paging channel license that you purchase, and must be returned
after our licensing agreement terminates.
The primary reason we ship a modem with RamPage is because the models we select
provide the best emulation of the communications used by an Alphamate page
entry terminal. An Alphamate is a device that looks like a fax machine, except
it has a full keyboard. Prior to wireless messaging software products like RamPage, the
only way to send a full text message by an operator typing
messages into an Alphamate terminal.
The RamPage modem is in fact dumb and slow when compared to today's high speed
multi-protocol modems. But message transactions are only a few hundred
bytes, and even at the slowest speeds, they are transmitted in only a few
seconds.
More importantly, not all carrier services will communicate reliably with
next generation modems. The carriers' switching equipment must
communicate with messaging traffic from both page entry terminals and software
controlled modems. As such, they usually rely on industry standards for the
slower connections, and proprietary standards for faster connections. In fact,
you will find that unlike RamPage, many PC-based paging products will endorse
one carrier service over all others, simply because they tune your PC's smart
modem to that carrier's requirements.
Since RamPage is expecting to use its own special modem, it does query the
paging channel to verify the modem's product ID. For special circumstances,
RamPage can be configured to work with an alternate modem, however, this
practice is strongly discouraged and is not supported. An alternate modem may
be tuned to work for you if you only have one carrier service, but most likely
will not work if you add a second.
Top
Q: What is 2-way wireless messaging all about?
A: Before this question can be answered, it should be understood that there
is no standard industry protocol for wireless messaging to two-way pagers. If fact,
the term 2-way is really not suitable, because what many carriers
offer is unofficially and more accurately known as either
one-and-a-half-way or one-and-three-quarter-way paging. For
simplicity, lets refer to them as 1.5-way and 1.75-way
respectively.
With 1.5-way paging, your pager is equipped with a cellular receiver instead of
the traditional radio receiver. As such, over-the-air broadcasts to your pager
are sent using cellular data packets instead of radio transmissions. Once the
message has been broadcast, the transmitter tower has performed the equivalent
of a standard 1-way message. After your pager has received the message data,
and even before you read the message, it secretly sends a cellular data packet
back to the tower to confirm its arrival. If necessary, the tower periodically
repeats the broadcast until it receives the confirmation. So, with 1.5-way
paging, you're guaranteed to eventually get the message, even if you're riding
the subway underground, are out of range, your pager is turned off, or miss
it for any other reason.
With 1.75-way paging, the tower broadcasting operation is the same as with
1.5-way paging. The only difference is that the sender of the message may ask
a question, and provide a multiple-choice response. For example, Sally,
what time should we meet back at the office? Bill. [1] 9am [2] 10am [3]
11am". If Sally wants to meet Bill at 10am, she enters the second choice
using the selection buttons on her pager, and a cellular data packet indicating
2 is send back to the tower, and is then attached to the message in the
carrier service's database. It is then up to Bill to periodically check for
the response using either software provided by the carrier, or an Internet link
to the carrier.
So far, you can see how even 1.75-way paging falls short of true 2-way
paging, since the sender of the message is not getting instant notification
of the response, and the receiver of the message has no way of communicating
a response that was not offered (for example, if Sally wanted to meet
at a restaurant at noon instead).
Carrier services have addressed these limitations in some interesting and
creative ways. First example, the message response can be directed to an
e-mail address, but it still requires the sender to have continuous access to a
keyboard. Second example, if the message sender and receiver each have pagers
with miniature keyboards, then they can exchange roaming e-mail.
Ergonomic Solutions will soon be offering several extensions to RamPage
with our own creative solutions for communicating with 2-way pagers, even
if the senders and receivers of messages don't use the same carrier.
Watch for future product announcements!
Top
Q: Why is my carrier rejecting my PIN when others work
fine?
A: First, contact customer service at your carrier, and verify (1) that your
air-time subscription is active, (2) that you have the correct PIN number, and
(3) that their records properly identify the type of pager you have, such as
alphanumeric (full text) or digital (numbers only).
If this doesn't reveal the problem, ask the service representative if your
account must be flagged or marked in some special way in order to receive
messages from delivery software. Some carriers refer to this flag as Remote
Access. Other carriers assign and issue to you a secondary PIN number for
this type of usage.
Its also possible that your carrier maintains online copies of their
subscription database at multiple office or transmitter sites, and for some
reason, the site nearest you does not have accurate information for your device.
If so, you should request that your call be elevated to the appropriate
technicians.
If further troubleshooting is necessary, you should provide the carrier
technicians with the message tracking information that RamPage records in
the Message Database. This includes the carrier's response codes that
occurred during the failed transmission.
Top
Q: When do I need to add a paging channel?
A: RamPage paging channels provide the delivery path of messages from the
RamPage database to the carrier services. All RamPage configurations must have
at least one paging channel. There are two primary reasons why you might wish
to add more channels.
First, more channels may be necessary if you have a high volume of messages.
The most common paging channel delivery mechanism involves a dial-up modem that
deposits your messages onto the carrier networks. This transaction sequence is
similar to that used by a cashier's 'card-swipe' machine for authorizing your
credit card. As such, it can take 15, 30, or even as much as 60 seconds to
complete the dial-up transaction. When you consider the average speed of your
carrier's response and the message volumes you are generating, you may begin to
experience delays which can be alleviated by adding more paging channels. Or,
you may be able to negotiate with your carrier service to add a dedicated
leased-line paging channel, which is fully supported by RamPage.
Second, you may wish to add paging channel(s) for purposes of redundancy. All
RamPage paging channels are controlled by a single designated host system in
your OpenVMS cluster (or by itself if its a standalone CPU). If either the
host system is down, or you lose the dial-up phone line, then the paging
channel will also be down. To achieve redundancy, you should consider having no
fewer than two paging channels, each controlled by a different host. During
normal operations, both channels will share the paging workload. However, if
one host is down or one phone line is down, you still will have a delivery path
to the carrier(s).
All paging channels require their own dedicated telephone line and serial data
port.
Top
Q: Can multiple systems share a common RamPage database or
paging channel?
A: A single RamPage database and all of its associated paging channels may
be shared by all licensed systems in an OpenVMS cluster. Each cluster and each
standalone system must have their own RamPage database and at least one paging
channel.
Databases and channels can't be shared by systems outside an OpenVMS cluster
for two reasons. First, there is real-time interaction between the RamPage
database and the host that is controlling the paging channel. Therefore, they
both must be on the same system or cluster in order to access the common
information stored on disk. Second, the scheduling of paging channel
activity is controlled by the OpenVMS Job Controller, which can't share its
workload outside a cluster.
If you have several separate clusters and/or standalone systems, and you wish
to establish a homogeneous paging configuration without maintaining many
databases and paging channels, you should consider installing the
enterprise-wide paging solution offered by
RamPage Enterprise.
Top
Q: Can a paging channel modem be connected to a network
terminal server?
A: A paging channel modem can be connected to a LAT terminal server, as
described in Appendix C in the RamPage Installation Guide.
A paging channel modem can only be connected to an IP terminal server if your
OpenVMS TCP/IP software provides a utility for mapping server ports to OpenVMS
virtual device names.
All paging channel communications are performed via QIO's from the RamPage
paging channel symbiont (under the direction of the OpenVMS Job Controller)
thru the OpenVMS TTDRIVER. As such, paging channels can only be shared by
members of the same cluster. Therefore, having a paging channel modem on a
terminal server provides the benefit of simplified cabling to remote
locations, however, the terminal server is incapable of providing the same
scheduled and controlled access offered by the Job Controller.
Experienced OpenVMS professionals may be aware of the ability to share network
printers on a terminal server across non-clustered systems, however, this task
is accomplished by the OpenVMS LAT printer symbiont. This symbiont is
restricted to the LAT protocol, and unlike the RamPage symbiont, does not
offer the bi-directional communications that would be necessary for exchanging
data with a modem.
Top
Q: What's the difference between an "on-site" paging system and a
carrier-based paging system?
A: On-site paging systems provide large work sites the benefits of
individual pagers without the air-time subscriptions charged by commercial
carriers. But, there are broadcast range limitations; most on-site systems are
equipped with a single small-scale transmitter only capable of reaching pagers
within a one mile radius. You will have difficulties if your messaging
requirements aren't limited to the work site. Commercial carriers are licensed
by the FCC for broadband signalling across a network of large-scale transmitter
towers. Coverage is based upon your subscribed services, and can range from
regional to nationwide messaging.
Both on-site and carrier-based paging systems use the industry standard paging
protocols for message dispatching, and are fully compatible with RamPage!
Top
Q: My message database is too big, even after doing a
$ RAMPAGE/MESSAGE/PURGE, how can I reduce it?
A: Refer to this
Message Database Reclaim procedure.