fwd_skytel - Forwards a skytel pager to another pin, email or phone number.
fwd_skytel --account={pin_number} [--pass={password}] --fwd={forward_to} --date={date} [--[no]copy] fwd_skytel --account={pin_number} [--pass={password}] --disable
Forwards the pager specified by --account to the phone, email or pin specifed by --fwd. --fwd is interpreted as an e-mail address if it contains an @ symbol, as a phone number if it contains dashes or parenthesis as in (212) 555-1212, or a pager pin if it contains only numbers.
Forwarding will be in effect until the date specified by --date. The --date paramater accepts any date format allowed by Date::Manip.
If --password is not provided, it will be prompted for.
--[no]copy] turns on or off mailbox copy. The default is to retail a copy of the forwarded message in your mailbox.
The second form of the command with the --disable option, turns off existing fowarding.
Requires HTTP::Cookies, LWP::UserAgent, Date::Manip and Term::ReadKey;
We have a single pager number which is used for after hours emergencies. In addition, all the techs who handle these calls have their own pagers. Instead of carrying around two pagers when you're on call, we forward the on-call pager to the on-call tech's pager. We wrote a cron job which runs fwd_skytel at the beginning of each week to foward the on-call pager to the on-call tech's pager.
Another manager found a different use for this. He always wanted to receive a copy of pages that went to the on-call pager. He would forward his on-call pager to his phone. However, SkyTel only allows you to forward your pager for 30 days at a time. He used this script to reforward the pager once a month with a cron job so the forwarding never expired.
Marc Prewitt, Chelsea Networks <mprewitt@chelsea.net>
Support more skytel options.
Windows Users:
You need to set a TZ variable to your timezone for the date calculations to work correctly. To do this, open the properties of "My Computer" and set a SYSTEM variable TZ to your timezone. I suggest using the form "EST5EDT" so you don't have to change it every 6 months when going to or from daylight savings time.
SSL/HTTPS Notes:
If you receive the message: "501 Protocol scheme 'https' is not supported" you do not have SSL installed and Pager::SkyTel will not be able to communicate with the SkyTel web server. Pager::SkyTel uses LWP::UserAgent for it's https support which in turn uses either IO::Socket::SSL or Crypt::SSLeay. Therefore, if you install one of them, things should work much better. See the README.SSL file which comes with LWP::UserAgent (in the libwww-perl package.)
To install Pager::SkyTel, copy and paste the appropriate command in to your terminal.
cpanm
cpanm Pager::SkyTel
CPAN shell
perl -MCPAN -e shell install Pager::SkyTel
For more information on module installation, please visit the detailed CPAN module installation guide.