24alpha blog

Auerswald Compact 3000 Tip #2: D-Kanal Dekoder

24alpha — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:29:01 +0000

Auch wenn der Name es nicht vermuten laesst: der D-Kanal Dekoder stellt nicht nur die D-Kanal-Informationen dar. Zumindest seit Version 2.5.2 Beta kann er auch die laufenden Logeintraege anzeigen. Das hat mir z.B. geholfen meine Emailprobleme zu beseitigen.

Auerswald Compact 3000 Tip #1: Log files

24alpha — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:55:03 +0000

Um an die Log-Files heranzukommen, einfach im Menue Service->Servicedaten das sogenannte ‘Tk-Anlagen Image’ herunterladen. Beim Speichern am Besten gleich die Endung .log durch .tgz ersetzen. Dann kann man die Log-Dateien entweder mit 7-zip (Windows) oder ‘tar xvzf ServiceData.tgz’ (Linux) entpacken.

How to disable ‘call waiting’ on UPC phone line

24alpha — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 17:36:00 +0000

After a number of phone calls I finally got in contact with someone in UPC who could actually tell me how this can be achieved. You simply have to dial ‘#72′. Happy days at last.

Note: This might not work for everyone (they guy mentioned that this depends on the type of switch your phone line is connected to).

How to suppress the User-Agent in Thunderbird

24alpha — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 10:33:23 +0000

Simply add a new preference ‘general.useragent.override’ and leave that string empty.

Advantech PCI-1620 and Ubuntu

24alpha — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 14:28:29 +0000

Mate of mine gave me one of the above mentioned PCI cards. This particular card provides 8 serial ports. It was quite easy to get the card working (no need to patch the kernel anyway). Here are the necessary steps:

Download the ‘Linux Driver for ICOM Cards’ from http://support.advantech.com.tw/Support/DownloadSearchByProduct.aspx?keyword=PCI-1620A
Run ‘tar xvzf ‘Adv950_Source_V3.30.gz’ (yes, it is a compressed tar file even if it doesn’t look like one)
Then ‘cd adv950_source_v3.30/2.6/’ (for a 2.6.x kernel)
‘make’
‘sudo make install’
And finally a ‘make test’ should result in the following:
/dev/ttyAP0 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP1 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP2 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP3 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP4 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP5 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP6 is RS232
/dev/ttyAP7 is RS232
Now copy the kernel module into the right place ‘sudo cp adv950.ko /lib/modules/2.6.24-28-generic/kernel/drivers/serial/’
Run a ‘sudo depmod -a’
Happy days!

Note: This is how it worked for me on Ubuntu 8.04.

Vodafone(Ireland) blocking encrypted SMTP

24alpha — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 20:48:49 +0000

I’m testing a 3G router at the moment and when I tried to send an email Thunderbird refused to do so claiming my email server didn’t support the STARTTLS. As I was quite sure that it did, I took out wireshark and had a closer look. Here’s the dialog between Thunderbird and my mail server when using my normal broadband line:

SMTP: S: 220 mail.blacknight.com ESMTP
SMTP: C: EHLO [192.168.67.104]
SMTP: S: 250-mail.blacknight.com | 250-STARTTLS | 250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN | 250-AUTH=LOGIN CRAM-MD5 PLAIN | 250-PIPELINING | 250 8BITMIME
SMTP: C: STARTTLS
SMTP: S: 220 ready for tls
TLSv1: Client Hello
…
And here’s what it looks like after Vodafone’s treatment:

Notice how they have removed the STARTTLS option. What the hell are they doing? The same problem happens with other email providers (google, gmx) too. I contacted Vodafone but no-one there seems to be willing to provide an answer.
I suspect that it’s just another patronizing behavior of Vodafone. Same as blocking all incoming TCP connections and blocking all incoming traffic to UDP port 1025. Do they really expect me to send my emails unencrypted?

Similar problems seem to exist in Germany too.

Update 1:

Using TCP port 587 for SMTP as suggested in the comments by christoph is working fine. Looks like vodafone isn’t monitoring that port.

Update 2:

Came across another issue with Vodafone Ireland and SMTP. Apparently they don’t like it when an SMTP server doesn’t require authentication. Vodafone forcefully closes such connection. Here’s an example when you use a normal broadband provider:

S: 220 xxxx.com ESMTP; Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:53:28 +0100
C: EHLO 24alpha
S: 250-xxxx.com Hello 24alpha, pleased to meet you
S: 250-ETRN
S: 250-AUTH=LOGIN
S: 250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5
S: 250-8BITMIME
S: 250 SIZE
C: MAIL FROM:
S: 250 , Sender ok
C: RCPT TO:
S: 250 , Recipient ok
S: DATA
S: 354 Enter mail, end with .

…

And here the same via Vodafone:

S: 220 ***********************************************************************
C: EHLO 24alpha
S: 250-xxxx.com Hello 24alpha, pleased to meet you
S: 250-ETRN
S: 250-AUTH=LOGIN
S: 250-AUTH LOGIN CRAM-MD5
S: 250-8BITMIME
S: 250 SIZE
C: MAIL FROM:
S: [TCP connection closed]

I understand the reason behind this. Basically Vodafone want to prevent spam from originating from their network. And an SMTP server without authentication is generally a bad idea.

Firefox 3.6 and Revenue’s ROS service

24alpha — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:31:37 +0000

Tried to submit my VAT returns today and noticed that the Java applet failed to work. I noticed a strange “‘invalid ‘in’ operand plugin” message in the Firefox’s error console. Turned out that I need a Java update on my box. I was running 1.6.0.11, updated it to 1.6.0.17 and now the applet works again. Question: shouldn’t Firefox during the update check that all the criteria are fulfilled? The correct Java version is definitely something it should check if it relies on it so heavily.

xplanet and Windows XP

24alpha — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 14:09:15 +0000

I always wanted to have xplanet running as a background process like I used to on Linux. Here’s how I did it:

Download and install the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools
Create the xplanet service: ‘instsrv xplanet “C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools\srvany.exe”‘
Modify the registry (using regedit) entry for the xplanet service:
- go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\xplanet
- add new key ‘Parameters’
- add new string value in Parameters, ‘Application’, set it to: ‘C:\Program Files\xplanet-1.2.0\xplanet.exe’
- add new string value in Parameters, ‘AppParameters’, set it to: ‘-fork -searchdir C:\”Program Files”\xplanet-1.2.0\xplanet -wait 600 -lat 51.89 -lon -8.49′ (that will set your point of view right over Cork)
Make sure your service is set to start automatically, ‘services.msc /s’, …

Don’t forgot to improve xplanet by using the nice pictures from Visible Earth

A morse code trainer for the Nokia 6030 (and potentially other phones too)

24alpha — Sun, 30 Dec 2007 17:11:40 +0000

A while ago I thought it would be nice to have morse code trainer on my mobile phone. I hoped that I then could use the time I spent commuting on the train to learn some morse code. So I had a look around and the only application that I could find was MobileMorse. Unfortunately, MobileMorse caused an exception on my Nokia 6030. So I decided to write my own morse code trainer. It is a very simple application, much simpler than MobileMorse but it seems to do the job on my phone at least. I also tested it quickly on a Sony Ericsson K790i and it seemed to work on it too. In theory it should work on any mobile phone that supports Java (CLDC-1.1, MIDP 2.0) – but as I learned quickly this isn’t the case as Java compatibility seems to vary between different phone models. I’m therefore also working on a version that uses Nokia’s Sound class to generate tones.

The program is intended for learning morse code using the Koch method. It therefore starts with two characters (level 1) and you can add additional characters as your proficiency improves – however not all signs of the international morse code are supported at the moment. I will add them in the next version.

I called the program BMorse (couldn’t come with a better name at the moment). If anyone else is interested in this program it can be download from the following address:

http://peterhertting.gmxhome.de/BMorse.jad

The .jar file can be found at http://peterhertting.gmxhome.de/BMorse.jar.

Please keep in mind that this is still work in progress! I would therefore be very interested in test results on other phones as well as suggestions for improvements etc.. I’d also appreciate if an experienced ham radio operator could provide me with some feedback regarding speed etc. I will also publish the code under the GPL soon.

Oh yes, don’t forget to use the headphones when you are trying the program. The speakers used in some phones are really crap.

Saving power on my laptop I

24alpha — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 18:41:04 +0000

I’m using an Acer TravelMate 4672WLMi at home and I was never happy with the lifetime of the battery. About 2 hours is the most I get out of it. So I’m trying to tweak Ubuntu (just upgraded to 7.10) a bit to see what can be done. I got the inspiration from http://www.lesswatts.org/ – so full credit to those boys and girls!

The first thing I wanted to do is to reduce the power consumption of the wireless card. You usually do this by calling ‘iwpriv eth1 set_power 5′ to enable the power-saving mode. However, I wanted an easier way without having to run this command manually whenever I’m not connected to the mains.

So I had a look around in /etc to see if I could find anything that could help. Here I came across a directory called laptop-mode which belongs to a package of the same name. Here I found a subdirectory conf.d/wireless-ipw-power.conf. This file consists of only one line (apart from a few comments):

CONTROL_IPW_POWER=0

That looked exactly what I needed. I changed that value to 1 and restarted the laptop-mode by running:

sudo /etc/init.d/laptop-mode restart

Unfortunately that didn’t have any effect as iwconfig indicated that the power saving for the wireless card was still disabled. However, I very quickly noted by running ‘sudo laptop_mode’ that the laptop mode wasn’t enabled at all:

$ sudo laptop_mode
Laptop mode disabled, active.

After a quick look in the /etc/init.d/laptop-mode I learned that I had to enable the laptop mode by setting ENABLE_LAPTOP_MODE to true in /etc/default/acpi-support (read the warning in the associated comment as well!). After this was done and another call of

sudo /etc/init.d/laptop-mode restart

the power saving for the wireless card was enabled. Seems to save a ‘massive’ 50mA. Happy days!

Of course, that’s not the end of it and more options will need to be tweaked to save more power. Why is nothing easy with Linux ?