SMS/USSD

This page was last updated in 2013 and may be outdated. Please update it if you can.

SMS and USSD support for Wikipedia

The simplest Vumi system consists of a transport worker and an application worker.

A transport worker is responsible for sending messages to and receiving messages from users in the big wide world. Transport mechanisms Vumi supports include SMPP, XMPP, Twitter, IRC, HTTP and a variety of mobile network aggregator specific messaging protocols. The application worker processes messages from a transport and sends replies – it holds the application logic. Vumi workers communicate over RabbitMQ.

A XMPP based demo is available with the following jabber ids: wikipediavumi@gmail.com and wikipediavumitest@gmail.com

You can see the code at: https://github.com/praekelt/vumi-wikipedia/

Background

• History of the setup is captured in https://rt.wikimedia.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=2826
• Git Code Documentation -

Monitoring

Two servers (one in each data center) are deployed, namely zhen and silver.

• Application key monitoring indicators :

• Zhen - http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?r=day&cs=&ce=&c=Miscellaneous+pmtpa&h=zhen.wikimedia.org&tab=m&vn=&mc=2&z=medium&metric_group=ALLGROUPS

• silver - http://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?r=week&cs=&ce=&c=Miscellaneous+eqiad&h=silver.wikimedia.org&tab=m&vn=&mc=2&z=medium&metric_group=ALLGROUPS

Troubleshooting

Possible problems (or known issues) are

Problem connecting to Redis

There will be log entries like the following:

2013-01-08 18:23:42+0000 [-] Starting factory <vumi.persist.txredis_manager.VumiRedisClientFactory instance at 0x3784638>

2013-01-08 18:25:43+0000 [VumiRedis,client] <twisted.internet.tcp.Connector instance at 0x3784758> will retry in 2 seconds

2013-01-08 18:25:43+0000 [VumiRedis,client] Stopping factory <vumi.persist.txredis_manager.VumiRedisClientFactory instance at 0x3784638>

Recovery: Restart Redis, restart Vumi.

Bad message crashes transport:

There will be a stack trace in one or more of the transport logs.
Recovery: Restart Vumi, send logs to Vumi team for debugging.

Problem connecting to SMPP

There will be log entries like the Redis ones, but referencing the SMPP client.
Recovery: Check network connectivity, escalate to operator.

Vumi recovery process management:

stop application - "sudo supervisorctl stop all"
start application - "sudo supervisorctl start all"
restart application - "sudo supervisorctl restart all"
restart with updated supervisord config - "sudo supervisorctl reload"

Escalation (Application) Contact:

• Jeremy Thurgood / jeremy@praekelt.com