interesting ldap application

I just thought I would share with the group an interesting
application I just implemented. First, a little background:

Last week I was heading towards Lake Havasu to pick up my daughter.
For those who know the trip, the is a BUNCH of nothing between
Phx. and Havasu....Anyway, I needed to make a call to a business contact
on the trip, and did not have the number....The number was tucked
safe in my LDAP sever at home. I was an hour out of Phx and would not be back
in the home office for at least another 5-6 hours. Only frequently called
numbers are entered into my cell phone, and very few were at that as the
phone was a new replacement.

So what I devised was a way to query my LDAP server at home (connected via COX),
by using SMS text/email messaging on my cell phone. It goes like this:

1. Send a email message from cell phone with the criteria to query in the subject line to
(The body of the message is ignored) a special address (e.g myquery@mydomain.com))

2. The procmail filter catches the special To: myquery@mydomain.com and fires up a
simple Perl script that queries my LDAP sever at home.

3. The results from that query are then emailed back to my cell phone.

The trick is to keep the results of the query small (make the query as specific
as possible) as ATT only allows a limited amount of characters to be sent
in the results. Normally, about 8-10 contacts on a fairly vague query.

There is a small charge for this transaction (.20 I believe....10 each way),
but well worth it when you need that important number.

Thinking about it some more, I suspect one could find many applications for
something like this: Query the company SQL server for the total sales at
that paticular moment, etc, etc. The whole process is really quite simple,
it was just a matter of "gluing" the pieces together.

Try pulling that one off on any MS box.

v/r
-mike