Last year Jacob and me worked on the osmo-sgsn of OpenBSC. We have improved the stability and reliability of the system and moved it to the next level. By adding the GSUP interface we are able to connect it to our commercial grade Smalltalk MAP stack and use it in the real world production GSM network. While working and manually testing this stack we have not used our osmo-pcu software but another proprietary IP based BTS, after all we didn’t…
The Cisco probeless monitoring protocol (pmp) is a proprietary protocol used by the Cisco ITP. This protocol is used to forward M3UA/MTPL3 messages to another server. The data is being sent on port 33500 using UDP. Previously I used okteta to study the file format and this time I used Pages and HexFiend. To understand the basic structure one needs to start somewhere. The first assumption for a telco protocol is DER or TLV encoded data. In wireshark one could…
When starting to use Jenkins I started with a configuration of multiple nodes and most jobs are multiconfiguration jobs. As it turns out looking at the build results for these jobs is annoying and most jobs don’t need to be multiconfiguration jobs at all. Jenkins doesn’t offer to re-configure the jobs and I decided to edit the config.xml file directly. The first thing I did is to change “matrix-project” to “project”. The next optional thing is to remove the “axes”…
I have been implementing various ETSI/3GPP specifications for more than a decade. At GMIT we provided implementation feedback for DVB-H and OMA BCAST. With the Osmocom project and Sysmocom I have several years of implementing GSM (and UTRAN) specifications on my back. In general GSM is a great engineering project. It lead to the creation of the ETSI, they adopted the English language for their specifications and they applied the information hiding principle. The group speciale mobile managed to create…
When creating the MGCP and SIP implementation I didn’t want to do string splitting/scanning myself but follow the grammar of the two RFCs. I decided to use the PetitParser framework. PetitParser is a parsing combinator. Which mostly mean you create small parsers and combine them with things like a sequence (parse this, than that and expect the input to be fully consumed). For a long time this approach was just okay but I recently started to use the code on…
QtDeclarative is where the fun is. Starting with Qt5.2 a JavaScript Engine written by Digia is used. Compared to JavaScriptCore and V8 this engine is very basic but tightly integrated with the QML and Quick code. Motivated by attending the Qt Developer Summit and my work on GNU Smalltalk I started to look at the VM. There are some environment variables that help to see what the JavaScript VM is doing and also how it is doing things. The below…
Almost a year ago I took my Qt/DirectFB Jenkins down. With that CI for MIPS/uclibc and DirectFB stopped being done (as far as I know). It was a difficult decision but it reflected my situation. I didn’t do a Qt project for a long time and didn’t have any Qt related work on the horizon. My main work involves using Smalltalk (GNU Smalltalk and Pharo) and writing a lot of a C code for the various Osmocom/GSM related projects and the…
We are building a gsmSCF in Pharo. Normally I would use MongoDB and Voyage to store my objects but as a gsmSCF deals with the balance of users I wanted to use something that supports transactions. Looking at the SQL support in Pharo. I found SqueakDBX, DBXTalk, native Postgres drivers but all of them lacked prepared statement support and one really doesn’t want to format queries by hand. This is when I decided to port GNU Smalltalks DBI framework and…
This is part of a series of blog posts about testing inside the OpenBSC/Osmocom project. In this post I am focusing on our usage of GNU autotest. The GNU autoconf ships with a not well known piece of software. It is called GNU autotest and we will focus about it in this blog post. GNU autotest is a very simple framework/test runner. One needs to define a testsuite and this testsuite will launch test applications and record the exit code, stdout and…
I was recently pointed to a software called Hubstaff. It is meant for virtual companies that do not trust their employees and want to see what their staff is doing. Two central features are to measure the activity and to regularly send screenshots. Hubstaff does not respect copyright! Their software is installing various GNU GPL and GNU LGPL licensed libraries without respecting the license of these libraries. The sourcecode was not offered at the same place and I didn’t see…