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Still alive, just not blogging

Harald Welte — Sun, 26 Aug 2018 16:00:00 GMT

It's been months without any update to this blog, and I feel sad about that. Nothing particular has happened to me, everything is proceeding as usual.

At the Osmocom project we've been making great progress on a variety of fronts, including

3GPP LCLS (Local Call, Local Switch)
Inter-BSC hand-over in osmo-bsc
load Based hand-over in osmo-bsc
reintroducing SCCPlite compatibility to the new BSC code in osmo-bsc / libosmo-sigtran
finishing the first release of the SIMtrace2 firmware
extending test coverage on all fronts, particularly in our TTCN-3 test suites
tons of fixes to the osmo-bts measurement processing / reporting
higher precision time of arrival reporting in osmo-bts
migrating osmocom.org services to new, faster servers

At sysmocom, next to the Osmocom topics above, we've

made the sysmoQMOD remote SIM firmware much more robust and reliable
after months of delays, finally SIMtrace2 hardware kits are available again
created autoamtic testing of pySim-prog and sysmo-usim-util
extended our osmo-gsm-tester based automatic testing setup to include multi-TRX nanoBTS setups

In terms of other topic,

my wife and I have been to a three week motorbike tour all over the Alps in July
I've done tons of servicing (brake piston fittings, brake tubes, fuel line, fixing rust/paint, replacing clutch cable, choke cable, transmission chain, replacing several rusted/worn-out needle bearings, and much more) on my 22year old BMW F650ST to prepare it for many more yers to come. As some type-specific spare parts (mostly plastic parts) are becoming rarer, it was best to take care of replacements sooner than later
some servicing/repairs to my 19 year old Audi A4 car (which passed German mandatory inspection without any deficiency at the first attempt!)
some servicing of my Yamaha FZ6
repaired my Fairphone 2 by swapping the microphone module (mike was mute)
I've re-vamped a lot of the physical/hardware infrastructure for gnumonks.org and other sites I run, which was triggered by having to move racks

Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973

Harald Welte — Sun, 09 Jul 2017 08:00:00 GMT

Exactly 10 years ago, on July 9th, 2007 we started to sell+ship the first Openmoko Neo1973. To be more precise, the webshop actually opened a few hours early, depending on your time zone. Sean announced the availability in this mailing list post

I don't really have to add much to my ten years [of starting to work on] Openmoko anniversary blog post a year ago, but still thought it's worth while to point out the tenth anniversary.

It was exciting times, and there was a lot of pioneering spirit: Building a Linux based smartphone with a 100% FOSS software stack on the application processor, including all drivers, userland, applications - at a time before Android was known or announced. As history shows, we'd been working in parallel with Apple on the iPhone, and Google on Android. Of course there's little chance that a small taiwanese company can compete with the endless resources of the big industry giants, and the many Neo1973 delays meant we had missed the window of opportunity to be the first on the market.

It's sad that Openmoko (or similar projects) have not survived even as a special-interest project for FOSS enthusiasts. Today, virtually all options of smartphones are encumbered with way more proprietary blobs than we could ever imagine back then.

In any case, the tenth anniversary of trying to change the amount of Free Softwware in the smartphone world is worth some celebration. I'm reaching out to old friends and colleagues, and I guess we'll have somewhat of a celebration party both in Germany and in Taiwan (where I'll be for my holidays from mid-September to mid-October).

DHL zones and the rest of the world

Harald Welte — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 23:50:00 GMT

I typically prefer to blog about technical topics, but the occasional stupidity in every-day (business) life is simply too hard to resist.

Today I updated the shipping pricing / zones in the ERP system of my company to predict shipping rates based on weight and destination of the package.

Deutsche Post, the German Postal system is using their DHL brand for postal packages. They divide the world into four zones:

Zone 1 (EU)
Zone 2 (Europe outside EU)
Zone 3 (World)

You would assume that "World" encompasses everything that's not part of the other zones. So far so good. However, I then stumbled about Zone 4 (rest of world). See for yourself:

So the World according to DHL is a very small group of countries including Libya and Syria, while countries like Mexico are rest of world

Quite charming, I wonder which PR, communicatoins or marketing guru came up with such a disqualifying name. Maybe they should hve called id 3rd world and 4th world instead? Or even discworld?

Ten years anniversary of Openmoko

Harald Welte — Sun, 27 Nov 2016 08:00:00 GMT

In 2006 I first visited Taiwan. The reason back then was Sean Moss-Pultz contacting me about a new Linux and Free Software based Phone that he wanted to do at FIC in Taiwan. This later became the Neo1973 and the Openmoko project and finally became part of both Free Software as well as smartphone history.

Ten years later, it might be worth to share a bit of a retrospective.

It was about building a smartphone before Android or the iPhone existed or even were announced. It was about doing things "right" from a Free Software point of view, with FOSS requirements going all the way down to component selection of each part of the electrical design.

Of course it was quite crazy in many ways. First of all, it was a bunch of white, long-nosed western guys in Taiwan, starting a company around Linux and Free Software, at a time where that was not really well-perceived in the embedded and consumer electronics world yet.

It was also crazy in terms of the many cultural 'impedance mismatches', and I think at some point it might even be worth to write a book about the many stories we experienced. The biggest problem here is of course that I wouldn't want to expose any of the companies or people in the many instances something went wrong. So probably it will remain a secret to those present at the time :/

In any case, it was a great project and definitely one of the most exciting (albeit busy) times in my professional career so far. It was also great that I could involve many friends and FOSS-compatriots from other projects in Openmoko, such as Holger Freyther, Mickey Lauer, Stefan Schmidt, Daniel Willmann, Joachim Steiger, Werner Almesberger, Milosch Meriac and others. I am happy to still work on a daily basis with some of that group, while others have moved on to other areas.

I think we all had a lot of fun, learned a lot (not only about Taiwan), and were working really hard to get the hardware and software into shape. However, the constantly growing scope, the [for western terms] quite unclear and constantly changing funding/budget situation and the many changes in direction have ultimately lead to missing the market opportunity. At the time the iPhone and later Android entered the market, it was too late for a small crazy Taiwanese group of FOSS-enthusiastic hackers to still have a major impact on the landscape of Smartphones. We tried our best, but in the end, after a lot of hype and publicity, it never was a commercial success.

What's more sad to me than the lack of commercial success is also the lack of successful free software that resulted. Sure, there were some u-boot and linux kernel drivers that got merged mainline, but none of the three generations of UI stacks (GTK, Qt or EFL based), nor the GSM Modem abstraction gsmd/libgsmd nor middleware (freesmartphone.org) has manage to survive the end of the Openmoko company, despite having deserved to survive.

Probably the most important part that survived Openmoko was the pioneering spirit of building free software based phones. This spirit has inspired pure volunteer based projects like GTA04/Openphoenux/Tinkerphone, who have achieved extraordinary results - but who are in a very small niche.

What does this mean in practise? We're stuck with a smartphone world in which we can hardly escape any vendor lock-in. It's virtually impossible in the non-free-software iPhone world, and it's difficult in the Android world. In 2016, we have more Linux based smartphones than ever - yet we have less freedom on them than ever before. Why?

the amount of hardware documentation on the processors and chipsets to day is typically less than 10 years ago. Back then, you could still get the full manual for the S3C2410/S3C2440/S3C6410 SoCs. Today, this is not possible for the application processors of any vendor
the tighter integration of application processor and baseband processor means that it is no longer possible on most phone designs to have the 'non-free baseband + free application processor' approach that we had at Openmoko. It might still be possible if you designed your own hardware, but it's impossible with any actually existing hardware in the market.
Google blurring the line between FOSS and proprietary code in the Android OS. Yes, there's AOSP - but how many features are lacking? And on how many real-world phones can you install it? Particularly with the Google Nexus line being EOL'd? One of the popular exceptions is probably Fairphone2 with it's alternative AOSP operating system, even though that's not the default of what they ship.
The many binary-only drivers / blobs, from the graphics stack to wifi to the cellular modem drivers. It's a nightmare and really scary if you look at all of that, e.g. at the binary blob downloads for Fairphone2 to get an idea about all the binary-only blobs on a relatively current Qualcomm SoC based design. That's compressed 70 Megabytes, probably as large as all of the software we had on the Openmoko devices back then...

So yes, the smartphone world is much more restricted, locked-down and proprietary than it was back in the Openmoko days. If we had been more successful then, that world might be quite different today. It was a lost opportunity to make the world embrace more freedom in terms of software and hardware. Without single-vendor lock-in and proprietary obstacles everywhere.

Holidays in Taiwan, again

Harald Welte — Wed, 24 Aug 2016 08:00:00 GMT

Ever since I first came to Taiwan in 2006 (which happens to be more or less exactly 10 years ago, watch out for a separate blog post about that), I've been coming back at least once every year until 2014. Sometimes it's business related ,but one trip per year has always been about holidays.

I really like the country for a variety of reasons. One of them is the beautiful landscape from sand beaches to tropical forsts and high mountains (Taiwan has more than 100 peaks higher than 3000m). This is also the reason I keep my Yamaha TW-225 motorbike here, as it's impossible to explore the island without your own transport. And I hate driving bulky, large cars. Plus, some of the narrow roads have ascent/descent levels and road conditions that you actually can only pass them with a motorbike, preferrably using offroad tyres.

But I digress. I like coming to Taiwan, and motorbiking accross the country is one of the main reasons why.

After the various trips before, including the FIXME last trip circling the island in 2014, I wanted to do something special this year. The original plan was to cross the southern cross-island highway (Provincial Highway 20) from Taitung to Tainan. Unfortunately that road has been closed for many years now due to typhoon related damage. Typhonns and Eathquakes (and associated landslides) unfortunately happen quite often around Taiwan.

I've received some news that a group of motorcyclists managed to pass the road very recently (despite officially being closed and having various construction sites enroute). However, the road conditions were very difficult, having to pass narrow gravel sections at the construction sites, etc. So I again postponed this plan until a future year.

Instead, I wanted to travel along provincial highway '7 jia', which passes alongside a river valley into the central mountain ranges towards Lishan, and from there take Nantou Lixing Industry road (aka road 89) further down south towards Ren'ai. This road is of the most narrow roads that you can find on maps of Taiwan, and leads through very remote mountain areas with little population. You can find an interesting report of somebody crazy enough to travel that road on a bicycle in 2015 online. The author describes it as the most epic of all rides in Taiwan and you can see pictures of the road conditions in it.

Unfortuantely, while on our way, a Typhoon struck the southern tip of Taiwan, and also brought loads of torrential rain into the central mountain areas. Given that road 89 is difficult even in dry conditions, I didn't want to take chances in terms of landslides and muddy road conditions, and I had to turn back from Lishan to Taipei.

In order to make the return trip a bit different, I went all the way up to Yilan, and then alongside the north-east coast to Gongliao, before heading back to Tiapei via Shifen and Pinxi.

Soon after returning to Taipei, the second Typhoon affected the weather (passing by off the north-east of Taiwan).

In the following week the weather was excellent and there was time for a second trip. However, due to the rain of the two typhoons I still didn't want to go for road 89, and decided to go towards the north coast and continue to explore some of the waterfalls described at the vonderful http://taiwanswaterfalls.com/ site. Specifically, those alongside the Keelung river valley, close to road 106 form Taipei towards the coast, then heading north along the coast, covering the tip and returning back to Taipei via Dansuei (aka Tamsui).

In summary, the motorbike tours were a lot of fun. What made them more fun than the previous trips was my strategy of using 'white' roads (smaller roads) and avoid the provincial highways whenever three was a 'white' alternative on the map. Also, the newly-discovered map of Taiwans waterfalls was helping a lot to find beautiful sights, and encourage to go on even uncharted roads at times, a real challenge to both bike and biker.

So if you ever consider recreational motorbike riding in Taiwan, my recommendations would be:

get a light-weight motorbike. There's no point for a heavy bike in Taiwan, other than for locals to show it off. Many mountain roads typically have speed limits of 30 or 40 kph, and while it is possible to go 10-20 kph faster, more than that is suicidal. So no need for a fast bike with large engine.
avoid travel on weekends. Everything is super crowded on weekends. I prefer to stay home (and even work) on weekends, while using the quiet weekdays to travel.
always choose mountainous roads over straight roads.
choose smaller 'white' roads over provincial highways. Even though provincial highways on weekdays have less traffic, they still tend to attract a fair number of trucks, and are generally more easy and a less challenging ride.
always carry sufficient water with you.
go in September or October, after the rain season (normally) is over. The weather is still warm to hot (depending on altitude).

(East) European motorbike tour on 20y old BMW F650ST

Harald Welte — Tue, 16 Aug 2016 08:00:00 GMT

For many years I've always been wanting to do some motorbike riding across the Alps, but somehow never managed to do so. It seems when in Germany I've always been too busy - contrary to the many motorbike tours around and across Taiwan which I did during my frequent holidays there.

This year I finally took the opportunity to combine visiting some friends in Hungary and Bavaria with a nice tour starting from Berlin over Prague and Brno (CZ), Bratislava (SK) to Tata and Budapeest (HU), further along lake Balaton (HU) towards Maribor (SI) and finally across the Grossglockner High Alpine Road (AT) to Salzburg and Bavaria before heading back to Berlin.

It was eight fun (but sometimes long) days riding. For some strange turn of luck, not a single drop of rain was encountered during all that time, traveling across six countries.

The most interesting parts of the tour were:

Along the Elbe river from Pirna (DE) to Lovosice (CZ). Beautiful scenery along the river valley, most parts of the road immediately on either side of the river. Quite touristy on the German side, much more pleasant and quiet on the Czech side.
From Mosonmagyarovar via Gyor to Tata (all HU). Very little traffic alongside road '1'. Beautiful scenery with lots of agriculture and forests left and right.
The Northern coast of Lake Balaton, particularly from Tinany to Keszthely (HU). Way too many tourists and traffic for my taste, but still very impressive to realize how large/long that lake really is.
From Maribor to Dravograd (SI) alongside the Drau/Drav river valley.
Finally, of course, the Grossglockner High Alpine Road, which reminded me in many ways of the high mountain tours I did in Taiwan. Not a big surprise, given that both lead you up to about 2500 meters above sea level.

Finally, I have to say I've been very happy with the performance of my 1996 model BMW F 650ST bike, who has coincidentally just celebrated its 20ieth anniversary. I know it's an odd bike design (650cc single-cylinder with two spark plugs, ignition coils and two carburetors) but consider it an acquired taste ;)

I've also published a map with a track log of the trip

In one month from now, I should be reporting from motorbike tours in Taiwan on the equally trusted small Yamaha TW-225 - which of course plays in a totally different league ;)

python-inema: Python module implementing Deutsche Post 1C4A Internetmarke API

Harald Welte — Sat, 23 Jul 2016 08:00:00 GMT

At sysmocom we maintain a webshop with various smaller items and accessories interesting to the Osmocom community as well as the wider community of people experimenting (aka 'playing') with cellular communications infrastructure. As this is primarily a service to the community and not our main business, I'm always interested in ways to reduce the amount of time our team has to use in order to operate the webshop.

In order to make the shipping process more efficient, I discovered that Deutsche Post is offering a Web API based on SOAP+WSDL which can be used to generate franking for the (registered) letters that we ship around the world with our products.

The most interesting part of this is that you can generate combined address + franking labels. As address labels need to be printed anyway, there is little impact on the shipping process beyond having to use this API to generate the right franking for the particular shipment.

Given the general usefulness of such an online franking process, I would have assumed that virtually anyone operating some kind of shop that regularly mails letters/products would use it and hence at least one of those users would have already written some free / open source software code fro it. To my big surprise, I could not find any FOSS implementation of this API.

If you know me, I'm the last person to know anything about web technology beyond HTML 4 which was the latest upcoming new thing when I last did anything web related ;)

Nevertheless, using the python-zeep module, it was fairly easy to interface the web service. The weirdest part is the custom signature algorithm that they use to generate some custom soap headers. I'm sure they have their reasons ;)

Today I hence present the python-inema project, a python module for accessing this Internetmarke API.

Please note while I'm fluent in Pascal, Perl, C and Erlang, programming in Python doesn't yet come natural to me. So if you have any comments/feedback/improvements, they're most welcome by e-mail, including any patches.

Conferences I look forward to in 2016

Harald Welte — Sun, 03 Jan 2016 16:00:00 GMT

While I was still active in the Linux kernel development / network security field, I was regularly attending 10 to 15 conferences per year.

Doing so is relatively easy if you earn a decent freelancer salary and are working all by yourself. Running a company funded out of your own pockets, with many issues requiring (or at least benefiting) from personal physical presence in the office changes that.

Nevertheless, after some years of being less of a conference speaker, I'm happy to see that the tide is somewhat changing in 2016.

After my talk at 32C3, I'm looking forward to attending (and sometimes speaking) at events in the first quarter of 2016. Not sure if I can keep up that pace in the following quarters...

FOSDEM

FOSDEM (http://fosdem.org/2016) a classic, and I don't even remember for how many years I've been attending it. I would say it is fair to state it is the single largest event specifically by and for community-oriented free software developers. Feels like home every time.

netdevconf 1.1

netdevconf (http://www.netdevconf.org/1.1/) is actually something I'm really looking forward to. A relatively new grass-roots conference. Deeply technical, and only oriented towards Linux networking hackers. The part of the kernel community that I've known and loved during my old netfilter days.

I'm very happy to attend the event, both for its technical content, and of course to meet old friends like Jozsef, Pablo, etc. I also read that Kuninhiro Ishiguro will be there. I always adored his initial work on Zebra (whose vty code we coincidentally use in almost all osmocom projects as part of libosmovty).

It's great to again see an event that is not driven by commercial / professional conference organizers, high registration fees, and corporate interests. Reminds me of the good old days where Linux was still the underdog and not mainstream... Think of Linuxtag in its early days?

Linaro Connect

I'll be attending Linaro Connect for the first time in many years. It's a pity that one cannot run various open source telecom protocol stack / network element projects and a company and at the same time still be involved deeply in Embedded Linux kernel/system development. So I'll use the opportunity to get some view into that field again - and of course meet old friends.

OsmoDevCon

OsmoDevCon is our annual invitation-only developer meeting of the Osmocom developers. It's very low-profile, basically a no-frills family meeting of the Osmocom community. But really great to meet with all of the team and hearing about their respective experiences / special interest topics.

TelcoSecDay

This (https://www.troopers.de/events/troopers16/580_telcosecday_2016_invitation_only/) is another invitation-only event, organized by the makers of the TROOPERS conference. The idea is to make folks from the classic Telco industry meet with people in IT Security who are looking at Telco related topics. I've been there some years ago, and will finally be able to make it again this year to talk about how the current introduction of 3G/3.5G into the Osmocom network side elements can be used for security research.

Deutsche Bank / unstable interfaces

Harald Welte — Thu, 29 Oct 2015 16:00:00 GMT

Deutsche Bank is a large, international bank. They offer services world-wide and are undoubtedly proud of their massive corporate IT department.

Yet, at the same time, they fail to get the most fundamental principles of user/customer-visible interfaces wrong: Don't change them. If you need to change them, manage the change carefully.

In many software projects, keeping the API or other interface stable is paramount. Think of the Linux kernel, where breaking a userspace-visible interface is not permitted. The reasons are simple: If you break that interface, _everyone_ using that interface will need to change their implementation, and will have to synchronize that with the change on the other side of the interface.

The internet online banking system of Deutsche Bank in Germany permits the upload of transactions by their customers in a CSV file format.

And guess what? They change the file format from one day to the other.

without informing their users in advance, giving them time to adopt their implementations of that interface
without documenting the exact nature of the change
adding new fields to the CSV in the middle of the line, rather than at the end of the line, to make sure things break even more

Now if you're running a business and depend on automatizing your payments using the interface provided by Deutsche Bank, this means that you fail to pay your suppliers in time, you hastily drop/delay other (paid!) work that you have to do in order to try to figure out what exactly Deutsche Bank decided to change completely unannounced, from one day to the other.

If at all, I would have expected this from a hobbyist kind of project. But seriously, from one of the worlds' leading banks? An interface that is probably used by thousands and thousands of users? WTF?!?

What I've been busy with

Harald Welte — Tue, 27 Oct 2015 16:00:00 GMT

Those who don't know me personally and/or stay in touch more closely might be wondering what on earth happened to Harald in the last >= 1 year?

The answer would be long, but I can summarize it to I disappeared into sysmocom. You know, the company that Holger and I founded four years ago, in order to commercially support OpenBSC and related projects, and to build products around it.

In recent years, the team has been growing to the point where in 2015 we had suddenly 9 employees and a handful of freelancers working for us.

But then, that's still a small company, and based on the projects we're involved, that team has to cover a variety of topics (next to the actual GSM/GPRS related work), including

mechanical engineering (enclosure design)
all types of electrical engineering
- AC/electrical wiring/fusing on DIN rails
- AC/DC and isolated DC/DC power supplies (based on modules)
- digital design
- analog design
- RF design
prototype manufacturing and testing
software development
- bare-iron bootloader/os/application on Cortex-M0
- NuttX on Cortex-M3
- OpenAT applications on Sierra Wireless
- custom flavors of Linux on several different ARM architectures (TI DaVinci, TI Sitara)
- drivers for various peripherals including Ethernet Switches, PoE PSE controller
- lots of system-level software for management, maintenance, control

I've been involved in literally all of those topics, with most of my time spent on the electronics side than on the software side. And if software, the more on the bootloader/RTOS side, than on applications.

So what did we actually build? It's unfortunately still not possible to disclose fully at this point, but it was all related to marine communications technology. GSM being one part of it, but only one of many in the overall picture.

Given the quite challenging breadth/width of the tasks at hand and problem to solve, I'm actually surprised how much we could achieve with such a small team in a limited amount of time. But then, there's virtually no time left, which meant no gpl-violations.org work, no blogging, no progress on the various Osmocom Erlang projects for core network protocols, and last but not least no Taiwan holidays this year.

ately I see light at the end of the tunnel, and there is again a bit ore time to get back to old habits, and thus I

resurrected this blog from the dead
resurrected various project homepages that have disappeared
started some more work on actual telecom stuff (osmo-iuh, for example)
restarted the Osmocom Berlin Meeting

Hardware outage affectiong osmocom.org, deDECTed.org, gpl-violations.org

Harald Welte — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 19:00:00 GMT

As usual, murphy's law dictates that problems will occur at the worst possible moment. One of my servers in the data center died on March 20, and it was the machine which hosts the majority of the free software projects that I've created or am involved in. From people.netfilter.org to OpenPCD and OpenEZX to gpl-violations.org and virtually all osmocom.org sites and services.

Recovery was slow as there is no hot spare and none of my other machines in the data center have backplanes for the old SCA-80 hard disks that are in use by that particular machine. So we had to send the disks to Berlin, wait until I'm back there, and then manually rsync everything over to a different box in the data center.

To my big surprise, not many complaints reached me (and yes, my personal and/or business e-mail was not affected in any way)

Recovery is complete now, and I'm looking forward to things getting back to normal soon.

Update on what I've been doing

Harald Welte — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 19:00:00 GMT

For the better part of a year, this blog has failed to provide you with a lot of updates what I've been doing. This is somewhat relate to a shift from doing freelance work on mainline / FOSS projects like the Linux kernel.

In April 2011, Holger and I started a new company here in Berlin (sysmocom - systems for mobile communications GmbH). This company, among other things, attempts to provide products and services surrounding the various mobile communications related FOSS projects, particularly OpenBSC, OsmoSGSN, OpenGGSN, but also OsmocomBB, and now also OsmoBTS + OsmoPCU, two integral components of our own BTS product called sysmoBTS.

Aside from the usual software development, this entails a variety of other tasks, technical and non-technical. First of all, I did more electrical engineering than I did in the years since Openmoko. And even there, I was only leading the hardware architecture, and didn't actually have to capture schematics or route PCBs myself. So now there are some general-purpose and some customer-specific circuits that had to be done. I really enjoy that work, sometimes even more than software development. Particularly the early/initial design phase can be quite exciting. Selecting components, figuring out how to interconnect them, whether you can fit all of them together in the given amount of GPIOs and other resource of your main CPU, etc. But then even the hand-soldering the first couple of boards is fun, too.

Of all the things I so far had least exposure to is casing and mechanical issues. Luckily we have a contractor working on that for us, but still there are all kinds of issues that can go wrong, where unpopulated PCB footprints can suddenly make contact with a case, or all kinds of issues related to manufacturing tolerances. Another topic is packaging. After all, you want the products to end up in the hands of the customer in a neat, proper and form-fitting package.

On the other hand, there is a lot of administrative work. Sourcing components can sometimes be a PITA, particularly if even distributors like Digikey conspire against you and don't even carry those low quantities of a component that we need for our 100-board low quantity runs. EMC and other measurements for CE approval are a fun topic, too. I've never been involved personally in those, and it has been an interesting venture. Luckily, at least for sysmoBTS, things are looking quite promising now. Customs paperwork, Import/Export related buerocracy (both in Germany as well as other countries) always have new surprises, despite me having experience in dealing with customs for more than 10 years now.

Also significant amount of time is spent on evaluating suppliers and their products, e.g. items like SIM/USIM cards, cavity duplexers, antennas, cables, adapters, power amplifiers and other RF related accessories for our products.

The thing that really caught me off-guard are the German laws on inventory accounting. Basically there is no threshold for low-quantity goods, so as a company on capital (GmbH/AG) you have to account for each and every fscking SMD resistor or capacitor. And then you don't only have to count all those parts, but also put a value at them. Depending on the type of item, you have to use either the purchasing price, or the current market price if you were to buy it again, or the price you expect to sell the item for. Furthermore, the trade law requirements on inventory accounting are different than the tax laws, not often with contradictory aims ;)

In the end it seems the best possible strategy is to put a lot of the low-value inventory into the garbage bin before the end of the financial year, as the value of the product (e.g. 130 SMD resistors in 0402 worth fractions of cents) is so much lower than the cost of counting it. Now that's of course an environmental sin, especially if you consider lots and lots of small and medium-sized companies ending up at that conclusion :(

So all in all, this should give you somewhat of an explanation why there might have been less activity on this blog about exciting technical things. On the one hand, they might relate to customer related projects which are of confidential nature. On the other hand, they might simply be boring things like dealing with transport damage of cavity duplexers from china, or with FedEx billing customs/import fees to the wrong address...

Overall I still have the feeling that I was writing a decent amount of code in 2012 - although there can never be enough :) Most of it was probably either related to OsmoBTS, OpenBSC/OsmoNITB or the various Erlang SS7/TCAP/MAP related projects. The list of more community-oriented projects with long TODO lists is growing, though. I'd like to work on SIMtrace MITM / card emulation support, the CC32RS512 based smartcard OS, libosmosim (there's a first branch in libosmocore.git). Let's hope I can find a bit more time for that kind of stuff this year. You should never give up hope, they say ;)

Why I hate phone calls so much

Harald Welte — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 19:00:00 GMT

The fact that I have more than 20 missed phone calls on my land line telephone after only half a day has passed triggers me to write this blog post.

It is simply impossible to get any productive work done if there are synchronous interruptions. If I'm doing any even remotely complex task such as analyzing code, designing electronics or whatever else, then the interruption of the flow of thoughts, and the context switch to whatever the phone call might be about is costing me an insurmountable amount of my productive efficiency. I doubt that I am the only one having that feeling / experience.

So why on earth does everybody think they are entitled to interrupt my work at any given point in time they desire? Why do they think whatever issue they have rectifies an immediate interruption in what I am doing? To me, an unscheduled phone call almost always feels like an insult. It is a severe intrusion into my work-flow, and has a very high cost to me in terms of loss of productivity.

Sure, there are exceptional absolute emergencies (like, a medical emergency of a family member). But just about anything else can be put in an e-mail, which I can respond to at a time of my choosing, i.e. at a time I am not deeply buried into some other task that requires expensive context switching and the associated loss of productivity. And yes, a response might be the same day, some days later, or even a week or more later. There are literally hundreds of mails of dozens of people that need to be responded to. I can never even remotely answer all of them in a timely manner, even if I'm working 12-14 hours a day up to 7 days a week.

Right now I'm doing the only reasonable thing that is left: Switch off all phones. And to anyone out there intending to contact me: Please think twice before calling me on the phone. Almost anything can be put in an e-mail. And if you really want to have a phone call, please request a scheduled phone call in an e-mail containing a very detailed agenda and explanation of the topic.

Having Fun with DHL Express!

Harald Welte — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 19:00:00 GMT

This is what I got when tracking one of my inbound shipments:

It seems DHL is having fun bouncing the package back and forward between Hong Kong and Leipzig(Germany). So far, it started in HK, then arrived in Leipzig on January 8, went back to HK, back to Leipzig, back to HK, back to Leipzig and is currently allegedly again in Hong Kong _after_ succesfully passing German customs clearance on January 15.

For the TCP/IP nerds among the readers: I wonder when the TTL expires.

Why do self-respecting hackers use Gmail & Co?

Harald Welte — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Yesterday morning I was reading through the logs of my exim-based mailserver and noticed _how_ many messages were delivered to Google/Gmail. This is mostly related to the various mailing lists that I'm hosting at lists.{gnumonks,osmocom}.org.

Now if those lists were general-purpose mailing lists for let's say a group of environmentalists or a local model train club, I wouldn't be surprised. But almost all of those lists are about very technical projects, where the only subscriber base should be people from either the IT security community, or the Free Software community. The former is typically extremely security and privacy aware, whereas the latter is at least to some extent in favor of what I would describe as 'being a producer rather than just a consumer of technology.

So why is there such a high degree of Gmail usage among those groups? I really don't get it. Let me illustrate why this is a surprise:

you give away control over your personal data
Control over your own data means you own it, you have it on your hard disk, it is not on somebody else's storage medium. Control over your data also means that somebody needs a search warrant to your home in order to get to it. It also means that you decide when or how to shut it down, not a large corporation in a foreign country.
you put your personal data within the U.S. jurisdiction
Depending on where you are, this may or may not be an improvement. I don't want to start a political debate here, but you have to be aware what this means specifically, especially in terms of government authorities or private companies getting access to your mails. I myself would not even say that I understand enough about the US legal system to determine the full outcome of this. Also, in case there was a subpoena or other legal action in the US, how would I defend myself? That's so much easier in my home country, where I know the laws and regulations.
you give Google not only the social web information who mails whom, but also the full content of that communication
Now Google may have privacy policies and other rules that this data is not to be mined for whatever purposes they deem fit. But first of all, what guarantees do you have on it? Definitely less than if you ran your own mail server on your own hardware. Secondly, whatever Google promises is always within the scope of the US jurisdiction. In the 10-year aftermath of 9/11 there have been a number of alarming developments including wiretaps to phone lines without court review/order, etc.

Now I don't want this to be a bashing of Google. The same applies more or less to any email hosting company. I also don't want it to be a bashing about the US. The above is meant as an example only. In Europe we have our own problems with regard to data retention of e-mail related data (who is mailing whom). But those only apply to companies that offer telecommunications services. If you host your own mail server, you are not providing services to anyone else and thus are not required to retain any data.

There's also what I would call the combination effect, i.e. millions of millions of people all using the same service. This leads to a large concentration of information. Such concentrations are ideal for data mining and to get a global 'who is who'. This information is much more interesting to e.g. intelligence communities than the actual content, as it is much easier analyzed automatically. It also doesn't help to encrypt your messages, as the headers (From, To, ...) are still unencrypted.

Furthermore, this concentration leads to single points of failure. I'm not speaking physically, as Google and other web-hosters of course know how to replicate their services using a large-scale distributed system. But all is under control by the same company, maintained by the same staff, subject to the same jurisdiction/laws, etc.

There was a time when the Internet was about a heterogeneous network, de-centralized, without a single point of failure. Why are all people running to a very few number of companies? The same question goes for sites like sourceforge. All the code hosted there subject to the good will of the hosting company. Subject to their financial stability, their intentions and their admin staff. They've had security breaches, as did apparently Google. Sure, self-hosted machines also have security breaches, but only the breakage of a very small set of accounts, not the breakage of thousands, hundred thousands or millions of users simultaneously.

Now hosting your own mailserver on your own machine might be a bit too much effort in terms of money or work for some people. I understand that. But then, there are several other options:

You team up with some friends, people you know and trust, and you share the administrative and financial effort
You look out for NGOs, societies, cooperatives or other non-for-profit groups that offer email and other services to their members. At least in Germany we traditionally have many of these.
You use a local, small Internet service company rather than one of the big entities.

While you still give up some control with those alternatives, you keep your data within your jurisdiction, and you still keep the spirit of de-centralization rather than those large concentrated single point of failures.

Travelling to Belem/Brazil to talk about OpenPCD and OsmocomBB at UFPA

Harald Welte — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 19:00:00 GMT

Tomorrow I'll be leaving for a 10-day trip to the signal processing lab of UFPA (Federal University of Para) in Belem, Brazil. I was kindly invited by Prof. Aldebaro Klautau to hold some lectures and lab exercises regarding Free Software (+Hardware) RFID projects like OpenPCD as well as Free Software GSM projects like OsmocomBB.

I would love to use that opportunity to spend some more time in Brazil for holidays, but my schedule really doesn't allow for anything like that at this time. It's always sad to have to miss such a chance. It would be exactly the right time of the year to spend some time at the beaches of Pernambuco or Alagoas... *sigh*

Heading for a business trip to Nairobi/Kenya

Harald Welte — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 19:00:00 GMT

I'm about to leave for a 1-week business related trip to Kenya... so please excuse any [additional] delays in reaching me. I really need to focus on my work in order to keep up productivity.

UPS sends me an invoice over 1 Euro-cent

Harald Welte — Thu, 27 May 2010 19:00:00 GMT

Yesterday I received this letter from the local UPS subsidiary in Germany.

This is nothing uncommon, as I often import some electronics parts or other equipment from outside the EU, on which I need to pay customs duties and/or import VAT. In such cases, they typically collect an estimated amount as COD (cash on delivery) and then send an invoice about the difference (if any).

The funny part in this case now is: The grand total after subtracting my COD payment is EUR 0.01 - in words: One Euro-cent. They really want me to do a bank transfoer or write them a cheque over 1 cent !?!

One wonders to what grand total the expenses for the paper, printing, postage, banking transfer fees and accounting fees on the UPS side will amount to for processing something like this.

I wonder what would happen if I didn't pay that 1 cent. Would they actually try to sue me? Probably simply stop delivering packets to me, which I cannot afford and thus rather pay that single cent...

The Emperor's Codes: The Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers

Harald Welte — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 19:00:00 GMT

During the last weeks, I've read the book The Emperor's Codes: The Breaking of Japan's Secret Ciphers. As you can guess from the title, the book relates to the various UK, American and Australian code breaker teams working on breaking the encrypted communication of Japan during the second world war.

There have been plenty of books about the history of breaking Germany's Enigma ciphering machine, but information on how the Japanese codes were broken so far didn't seem to be as widespread - despite the resepective archives being opened up during the last decades.

It has been a most interesting reading. As you can imagine, at that time almost nobody had a sufficient understanding of the Japanese language, not even thinking about how to encode Japanese writing into morse code.

Nonetheless, all of the Japanese merchant, diplomatic, army and navy codes have been broken during the war. And surprisingly, the Japanese never really assumed something is wrong with their actual encryption method. All they did is to replace the codebook or the additive codebook.

Also, just like in today's GSM (A5/1) crypto attacks, even back then the importance of known plaintext could not be underestimated. The verbosity of Japanese soldiers addressing a superior officer and the stereotypical nature of reports on weather or troop movements gave the cryptographers plenty of known plaintext for many of their intercepted message.

What was also new to me is the fact that the British even back then demanded that Cable+Wireless provides copies of all telegraphs through their network. And that's some 70-80 years before data retention on communications networks becomes a big topic ;)

Overall, definitely a very interesting book. I can recommend it to anyone with an interest in security, secret services, WW2 history and/or cryptography.

TXL-CDG-BLR-DLH-TPE

Harald Welte — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 19:00:00 GMT

This was the route that I was taking to Taipei this time: Berlin, Paris, Bangalore, Delhi, Taipei... with 7 hours in Bangalore and 4 hours in Delhi, resulting in a total travel time of about 38 hours.

Everything went surprisingly well and I did a lot of work. However, my day/night rhythm is basically completely gone by now. Need to try to synchronize with local time.

Oh, and if you're asking yourself "why"? Because airline ticket pricing is the most ridiculous thing on this planet, even worse than stock exchange. Any more 'direct' asymmetric Germany->Taiwan->India->Germany flight would have been about three times as expensive as both a Germany->India->Germany and a India->Taiwan->India round trip ticket together.

German Post paper form shows HTML font tag

Harald Welte — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Something fun for a change: This morning I had one of those "you were not present when we tried to deliver something to you, please come to the post office to pick it up" cards in my mailbox.

However, as the scan of this very card shows (check for the red arrow), they inadvertently show half of a HTML FONT tag for the font "HELVETICA" on the actual printed card. I wonder how nobody could notice ;)

Playing around with the HTC TyTN II / Kaiser

Harald Welte — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

For reasons that I cannot yet disclose, I have obtained a HTC TyTN II (aka Kaiser). This is my first (and hopefully last) Windows Mobile based device.

So far I've taken the device fully apart, unmounted all the shielding covers and took high-resolution photographs of each and every part of the phone. The resulting information is now that I'm aware of all the major components in the device, and I've started to do some data mining on those components.

As everyone knows, HTC used a Qualcomm MSM7200 based chipset in this device. The MSM integrates both the GSM baseband (DSP+ARM9) as well as the application processor (ARM11) and many other things. What's less known is the further peripheral configuration.

The Bluetooth and WiFi chips are from Ti (BRF6300 and WL125, respectively).
The power management unit is a Qualcomm PM7500
NAND+DRAM are in a multi-chip module (1.8V, 2GBit NAND x8, 1GBbit DRAM x32) from Samsung
The 3G/GSM RF part consists of Qualcomm's RFR6500 (receive with integrated GPS) and RTR6275 (transmit) as well as AWT6280, AWT6273 and AWT6273 amplifiers
There furthermore is a CPLD: Xilinx XC2C128 (3000 system gates, 128 macrocells).

For those interested, I'll go through my PCB photographs and will edit and publish them soon.

I am now digging through all the various XDA/WM6 hacker information out there and trying to understand the various tools that can be used for further taking apart the software side. I've already managed to get into the bootloader, which apparently offers a standard USB serial emulation that can be accessed even from a Linux PC.

Unfortunately the MSM7200 is a highly proprietary/closed chipset, and there is very limited public information available. I've already ran into this while evaluating potential hardware for OpenMoko at some point in the past. I became curious about this MSM7xxx chipset family when they were first added to the ARM-Linux machine type registry many months ago.

Anyway, meanwhile Google seems to be doing a lot using this chipset, as they have recently announced the availability of a linux-msm.git tree. The source code should document many things such as GPIO assignments, IRQ's and contain drivers for most of the hardware (on the application processor side).

Now if some of you ask yourselves if I have turned my back on OpenEZX and OpenMoko: No, that's not true. I'm just looking at this for a very peculiar reason. Hopefully I'm able to reveal more soon.

incommunicado for a while

Harald Welte — Sun, 02 Dec 2007 19:00:00 GMT

It seems like my main mail server, ganesha.gnumonks.org, is facing some severe problems (ext3 corruption on a 3ware hardware RAID-1, i.e. something that clearly should not happen.

As per Murphy's law, this had to happen exactly while I was in-flight on my trip to Bangalore for FOSS.in 2007 :( Had it happened 2 days earlier, i would have actually within physical reach of the machine in question.

Luckily, all my hosted servers have remote consoles and actually even remote access to the BIOS setup. So I'm trying to recover what's to recover. The exim mail spool is on the affected /var partition. The much more important cyrus IMAPD spool is not affected. What a relief.

Still, everyone who tried to contact me: Please expect some delays in email based communication through the next few days. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Short update

Harald Welte — Thu, 19 Apr 2007 19:00:00 GMT

The last couple of weeks have again been so busy that I didn't find the time to update this blog. After returning from the Taipei trip, as usual, there were tons of things to be done for OpenMoko. Later I spent about one week on a business trip to Bangalore, from which I've returned monday afternoon.

Now I'm only home until thursday next week. Next friday, I'll once again depart for Taipei to speed up and coordinate OpenMoko/FIC development.

Apple can't even properly translate their SPAM

Harald Welte — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 19:00:00 GMT

I just received SPAM from apple: "Mit dem Mac ist Codieren immer und überall möglich." and further down "Codieren. Kompilieren. Berechnen."

Seems like a multi-billion multi-national company cannot even afford some native speaker to proof-read their advertisements. Quite embarrassing.

G5 Quad broken one month after warranty: The big bang

Harald Welte — Sat, 03 Mar 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Last night, I was once again annoyed by the slow build time of our dual AMD64 2.4GHz build server, and I wanted to use my Apple G5 quad again as a build/compile system.

So I pressed the power button, and immediately in that instance there was an extremely loud BANG!. No smoke, no smell, just that bang. Standby/trickle power was still there, the LED's kept shining.

I quickly opened the case, too off the covers, etc. There is no visible component that has suffered any damage. No leaked/exploded capacitors, no residue from some electrical spark, nothing.

And then I found out: The machine arrived on February the 2nd, and now it's exactly one month after the 1 year warranty has expired. I wonder how they can time their system failures that well :(

A little bit later I found out about the Apple Power Mac G5 Repair Extension Program for Power Supply Issues. It seems like this is a common bug, especially when you see things like this lengthy list of people who report a similar effect.

Seems like I'll have to call some local Apple dealers the first thing Monday morning....

Federal "Express" - One month to get a customer account

Harald Welte — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 19:00:00 GMT

Since sending hardware to Werner Almesberger in Argentina using DHL seems to be suboptimal, I decided to give FedEx a try. So I went to their web-site, and tried to register for a customer account / number.

What struck me first, is that they require you to enter both land-line AND mobile phone number. As if everyone had both these days. I know a lot of people who either only have land-line, or mobile. And obviously there are people like myself, who would never want FedEx to contact them via mobile at all.

Anyway. What I then got back was an automatic email (in German) indicating that the respective employee is "Out of Office till 21st of February", and that "e-mails to this address will not be processed during this time".

Whew, I thought. What kind of express. It takes only three weeks to get a customer number. Maybe I should resort to UPS next. *sigh*

Dual-Opteron liquid cooling leaking

Harald Welte — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 19:00:00 GMT

I'm not really having that much luck with the liquid cooling system of my main workstation. Today, one of the CPU coolers (dual socket 940 board) started leaking. Unfortunately it was the cooler of the CPU sitting above the AGP and PCI-X slots, spilling coolant on th Radeon 9200 and E1000 cards.

Coincidentally all that happened while I was having a bath, but that just as a side-note.

Now the box still boots up and is accessible from the network. Just no graphics output. Pretty bad for what I use as a dual-head compile and development workstation. So far it looks like at least that AGP card has died. I already bought a used one on eBay (you can't get any Radeon 9200 these days, and that's the really last 'free' graphics chip out there [apart from Intel on-board stuff]...). It could also be the AGP socket or something completely different. I don't have any spare AGP cards, just PCI... 5V PCI that don't fit in the 3.3V-only PCI-X slots, so I couldn't test it with a different card right now.

Now since this is the second time I'm having quite big trouble with that liquid cooling system, this is a good time to re-think whether it was that good an idea. I still think it was. I mean, for the better part of two years, this system has been running day and night, without any problems. In fact it is so quiet that I now regard my Quad G5 (unloaded, all fans at minimum) as extremely loud. And it is that quiescence which I love so much, and it is even worth at least those two times I've now had problems.

Allnet Allsound / U-Media AudioMate

Harald Welte — Sat, 12 Aug 2006 19:00:00 GMT

I couldn't resist any longer to buy a Allnet Allsound aka U-Media AudioMate, basically a small 802.11 WLAN capable Internet streaming radio stand alone receiver. Something that you can just put into your kitchen / bedroom. It hooks up to your WLAN and plays MP3 radio streams stand alone. No running computer / hard disk / server / ... required. IT also seems to support UPnP A/V, but I yet have to look into some Free server software for this.

Oh and yes, you can actually use it as alarm clock, waking you with tunes of your favorite Internet streaming radio. How cool is that?

The wonders of Vienna airport

Harald Welte — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 19:00:00 GMT

For my trip to Shanghai, the both cheapest and most convenient flight schedule was offered by Austrian. I mainly use KLM / NW / Air France / Lufthansa for my flights, so Austrian was definitely a new experience.

So here I am, connecting to my int'l flight at Vienna airport. Free 802.11b wireless Internet access, unfiltered, with a DHCP server that provides you an official IP. Guess I'll never connect voluntarily at Frankfurt, Paris or Amsterdam again. Finally somebody understood how you can make an airport much more attractive to the [IT] business traveller, without any big investments.

Software for paleeograpy of Indic scripts

Harald Welte — Sun, 14 May 2006 19:00:00 GMT

Those of you who know me a bit better will know that my now ex-{fiance,girlfriend} is studying indian philology and indian cultural history at Freie Universitaet Berlin. Now when you think about philology, you will probably think of old people wading through books and paper.

To the contrary. I've always been amazed how much software development they actually do (or have made) there. Some years back, I learned about Sanskritreader, an OCR (optical character recognition) software package for devanagari script.

Now their latest software is IndoSkript, a Palaeograpy software. It comes with a ~600MB database of scans of anciend Indic handwritings, where evey glyph in those scripts has been individually separated, and the scripts are annotated, etc.

Using that software (it's mainly a database software) you can for example check how a particular glyph was written in a certain timeframe in a specific dynasty in the Mysore area. Or you can draw [or import a scan?] a glyph and have it do pattern-matching, giving you a probabilistic analysis of which already-known glyphs match your new one the most.

As of now, it ships with a database of Brahmi, consisting more than 700 scriptures of more than 170,000 glyphs total.

It's great that they develop these tools, and it's even better that they are published as public domain software. What would be even better, is if they made their software Free Software and publicized the source code. This way other people could contribute and e.g. add a much-needed non-German localization, a precondition for any kind of international (e.g. Indian) use of it.

Maybe I can find a minute (and a minute of their time) to explain to them the marvels of Free Software.