SMS Server Tools

Step by Step instruction for Windows

You need about 150 MB free space on drive C or whereever you install it.

Cygwin is not a Unix emulator. It is a set of standard programs from the Unix world, that were translated to windows. Cygwin adds a lot "missing" functions to windows, so most Source codes for Unix can be translated to Windows with minor changes.

It is very useful to know the basic Unix commands but you can also continue with this instruction if you have no Unix knowledge.


Go to www.cygwin.com and klick on Install Now.

Klick on Next until you can select a download server. Select one that is near to you and klick on Next

After the list of cygwin packages is received you can select the parts that you want to install. Do not deselect anything.

Open the Devel list and select gcc and make by klicking one time on them. Then klick on Next until you can see the progress bar. The default settings are Ok.

The download takes about 60 minutes with an ISDN or 64k connection, so watch TV or do something useful now.

Download the SMS Server Tools into the directory c:\cygwin\usr\src. Some windows versions store the file with a wrong filename (*.tar.tar) instead of *.tar.gz but this does not cause any problem.

Start a Cygwin Bash Shell from the Windows start menu. This shell is similar to the MS-DOS window but it accepts Unix commands.

Enter the following commands:
mkdir /var/spool
cd /usr/src
tar -xvzf smstools*.tar.*

Now you have extracted the package of source codes and need to modifiy it a little bit. Open the file c:\cygwin\usr\src\smstools\src\Makefile with a text editor, for example Word or Wordpad.

Remove the # from the line
CFLAGS = -D WINDOWS.

Enter the following commands in the Cygwin Bash Shell:
cd /usr/src/smstools
make install

You should not see any error message. Warnings are acceptable.

Open the file c:\cygwin\etc\smsd.conf and modify it as described in configuring.
The name of the first serial port is /dev/com1. Use always / instead of \ when you write directory names. The whole config file is case-sensitive.

Run smsd by entering the command smsd -s in a Cygwin bash shell window.

Send short messages by creating SMS Files in the directory c:\cygwin\var\spool\sms\outgoing or by using the command sendsms.

The book describes the installation procedure of the SMS Server Tools much more in detail. It also explains how to install and use other useful programs like Apache webserver, MySQL, PHP script language, cronjobs, shell scripts, sendmail, fetchmail, formail, sed, cut, grep, awk.