Paging software results summary

[Josh Smith <netmarket.com">josh]

Here's a brief summary of my efforts to obtain and install some free
alphanumeric paging software:

* buzzerd was never released, and development was cut off some time ago. The
  author (Herb Morreale) reports that a commercial or free version may come
  out eventually, but he recommended tpage in the meanwhile.

* A couple of people recommended tpage. In spite of references to a Makefile
  in the docs, though, I couldn't find a distribution that included one, and
  it appears (to my admittedly fairly superficial skim) to be an essential
  piece of the puzzle. Even the allegedly canonical source (at
  "ftp://anonftp.geo.mtu.edu:/pub/ixo/tpage-2.40.tar.gz") lacked a Makefile,
  and my attempts to compile without one on my Solaris 2.3 system failed
  miserably.

* A couple of other people recommended HylaFax, the latest incarnation of
  FlexFax. It took me a while to find out where the paging support was, but
  I finally figured out that it claimed to do what I needed -- and lo and
  behold, when compiled and installed, it actually did.

So, I'm using HylaFax now, and am very happy with it; I'd recommend it in
general, especially if you're already running FlexFax, or have thought about
doing so. It seems to be a much more robust product than previous versions
of FlexFax, so if you've had a bad time with FlexFax in the past (I had),
you might want to give this a try.

I'm still missing one piece, though: I discovered that the paging service we
use only supports the IXO protocol for its alphanumeric pagers, and that
their IXO server won't talk to numeric pagers. I'd hoped that HylaFax might
support the standard SkyPage touch-tone interface, but it doesn't seem to.
(If I'm wrong about this, I'd love to know how to do it; it'd be great to
use it for everything...)

Assuming that HylaFax really doesn't talk to a touch-tone service, though,
does anyone have any recommendations for software that does?

Thanks again to everyone who sent suggestions to my first query, especially
those who I haven't thanked already. :^/

--
Josh Smith <joshnetmarket.com>     ::  WWW: http://www.netmarket.com/
Senior Systems Manager              ::  FTP/Telnet/Gopher: netmarket.com
The NetMarket Company               ::  Finger/E-mail: infonetmarket.com