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…
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…
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…
Yesterday I migrated all trac installations but openbsc.osmocom.org to a new host. We are now running trac version 0.12 and all the used plugins should be installed. As part of the upgrade all tracs should be available via https. There are various cleanups to do in the next couple of weeks. We should run a similar trac.ini on all the installations, we need to migrate from SQLite to MySQL/MariaDB, all login pages/POSTS should redirect to the https instead of doing a…
I am currently implementing GSM ARFCN range encoding and I do this by writing the algorithm and a test application. Somehow my test application ended in a segmentation fault after all tests ran. The first thing I did was to use gdb on my application: $ gdb ./si_test (gdb) r … Program received signal SIGSEGV, Segmentation fault. 0x00000043 in ?? () (gdb) bt #0 0x00000043 in ?? () #1 0x00000036 in ?? () #2 0x00000040 in ?? () #3 0x00000046…
This is part of a series of blog posts about testing inside the OpenBSC/Osmocom project. In this post I am focusing on continuous integration with Jenkins. Problem When making a new release we often ran into the problem that files were missing from the source archive. The common error was that the compilation failed due some missing header files. The second problem came a bit later. As part of the growth of OpenBSC/Osmocom we took code from OpenBSC and moved it into…
The OpenBSC and Osmocom project has grown a lot in recent years. It has grown both in people using our code, participating in the development and also in terms of amount of sourcecode. As part of the growth we have more advanced testing and the following blog posts will show what we are doing. Each post will describe the problems we were facing and how the system deployed is helping us to resolve these issues. OpenBSC/Osmocom and continous integration (Jenkins)…
Earlier this year I created a Hardware company with a friend to supply to our GSM community and beyond. One of our first products is the SIMtrace Hardware (CC Licensed, actually it should work with any Smartcard). Today I had to wait a bit and decided to convert the CLI application that talks to the firmware to a GUI application. I did this by running the CLI part in a QThread and using QMetaObject::invokeMethod to callback to my GUI. I…
Once up on a time I was sitting in a cold hall at the Barcelona exhibition ground, a power outage has taken down several DVB-H platforms (racks consisting of servers, streamers, RF equipment…) and once power was restored red LEDs were blinking, systems not coming up automatically, hordes of engineers trying to boot the right kernel, trying to remember the multicast routes they had typed in by hand, chaos, hectic. It was interesting to witness that as we could lay…