that disk did not die the clicking death

When I put a FRITZ!Box 7390 in place here more than 2 years ago, one of the features I discovered with big joy and that I started to make use of, was that it powers down USB attached ATA disks after a user defined period of inactivity. You can also have a USB hub in between, and I started making use of that as well.

The ATA disk (#1) I attached, is actually a notebook disk with its own external housing. It got formatted with ext2, because I prefer that over the DOS file system.

In the beginning of 2012 that disk (#1) was no longer accessible. First I was sure, that it had died the clicking death. But when I attempted to replace it with another one (#2),
it turned out, the source of irritation was actually the USB hub, because after eliminating the USB hub and attaching disk #2 directly to the FRITZ!Box disk #2 was "perfectly" accessible again.

So I gave disk #1 another try, mounted it somewhere else, and that worked without problem.

I thought, I should note this somewhere, because it might occur to others as well.

Of course, why should live USB hubs live for ever? But I was rather, rather astonished to understand this scenario.

Well, it's not absolutely unlikely, that disk #1 will die for ever after being in use in another environment for another while. That's a behavior I found documented elsewhere.

No, the housing (external case) wasn't the reason for the problem, at least it worked with other disks.

my FRITZ!Box 7390 stopped functioning last night, but now it works again.

• I tried restarting it in the morning, but it did not wake up.
• I re-animated my 7270, and phone-wise it worked fine, but not DSL-wise – all that took quite a while.
• The guy at the Deutsche Telekom support hotline told me, the 7270 would not talk VDSL, and my access was configured to be VDSL. He is right.
• I was almost on my way to borrow a splitter and a VDSL modem router at the next Deutsche Telekom shop.
• I replaced the device's power supply with a switchable one, that I have on stock. Why didn't I try that in the first place? Well … – are you always instantly aware of all your available options?
• 7390 started up fine again. That made me happy again, at least on the level of happiness before last night's disaster.
• Contacted AVM regarding the broken power supply.
• I purchased the 7390 in May 2010.
• Will they tell me, the 7390's power supply is too old to be replaced by them for free? Not unlikely.
• But they could be nice and take my engagement into account, that I showed, when the dradio underscore URLs broke the Internet radio modules in their phone and WIFI repeater products.
• Update 2012-03-14: AVM sent me a free replacement for the broken power supply.

my call monitor software is going jruby

My FRITZ!Box call monitor is written in ruby-1.9. So far I am running it using MRI-ruby-1.9.

This call monitor is a FRITZ!Box call monitor, it does not monitor the calls on my smartphone yet (which is rather, rather sad). Most of the year (for economical reasons) I should sit in a customer's office quite a little away from my place – receiving calls on my smartphone. So it makes much sense to get my call monitor software to monitor the calls on my smartphone one day (rather sooner than later).

Just recently (with the help of RVM) I delved into the the jruby world, and of course I am trying to run my call monitor software also with "jruby --1.9".
My current problems with "jruby-1.6.0.RC2 --1.9" are with I18N and encodings, so I cannot open my gmail address book with "r:UTF-16LE:UTF-8". My evasive strategy is to let it read a UTF-8 version of it.
The ruby CSV module, that parses my address book using regular expressions, seems to give the runtime system yet unseen tasks.
Maybe I am not too far away from running a slightly adapter version of my call monitor in jruby and therefore on a JVM.

Of course, IronRuby (a .Net ruby implementation) is also an option.

There are not that many different smartphone operating systems, that run JVM-s, so we are mainly talking about Android.
Does Android allow non-core software to (sort of) monitor the incoming and outgoing calls?

Once jruby successfully runs my call monitor, the way is free to go for an Android implementation. I am rather hot for it.

Update 2011-03-07:
After a couple of postings on user@jruby.codehouse.org and especially with the support of Thomas E. Enebo, my software now runs just as well with the very, very latest jruby, that I produced through "rvm install jruby-head".

Update 2011-03-28:

Now it runs reading the XML Google Contacts, which is more comfortable, as I can download it on the command line.

an alert on my FRITZ!Box 7390: "internet: Bonk Attack detected"

I found this message today in my telnet session on my FRITZ!Box:

Nov 26 10:16:25 dsld[2178]: internet: Bonk Attack detected (1)

I think, this I saw this already a couple of months ago, and I think, the box rebooted then, but it didn't do that no.

yet another posting of mine on the FRITZ!Boxes

Somebody asked me a few questions regarding the FRITZ!Boxes, and I think, it makes sense to answer them here on this blog.

No, I haven't been digging into the FRITZ!Boxes "at levels well below the standard web UI".

There is no SSH server, that comes with the FRITZ!Boxes.There are private web-sites, where you can find a ready-made dropbear SSH server. I got mine that way. And a gkrellmd as well.

There should be a way, to create yourself a development system targeted towards the "busybox" on your particular FRITZ!Box, but there are various slightly different processors being employed. I wasn't successful there, when I tried. There is ip-phone-forum.de, where the FRITZ!Boxes get discussed a lot, but the preferred language there is German, although they would most certainly try to answer question, that people ask in English.But the threads are mostly in German. Be aware, that the main community for the FRITZ!Boxes is located in Germany and I guess also in Austria and in Switzlerland. You may also find a HOWTO, that explains how to set up a development environment.
But actually ... - see above!

The "international" 7390 "speaks" English, but I don't think, there a lot on frequent firmware updates for it. They only provide frequent firmware updates for their resp. battleship, and that is "certainly" not the *international* version of the 7390 but the "German" version -- but how do I actually know? I don't own an international 7390, I only brought one to Martinique and saw it working for like 2 weeks.

I assume the firewall on the FRITZ!Boxes is homegrown.

What tools and languages are available?
Well, basically they use the "busybox" software and what is built into that.
Nowadays there is also a "lua" interpreter provided. AVM seem to use that for CGI purposes.
perl etc. are regarded far to resource hungry.

how to call a SIP phone by its IP-address

You may of course replace IP-address here by DNS name.

The Scenario:

The callee has a number of accounts configured on his SIP phone (resp. SIP capable router or whatever (a FRITZ!Box 7390 in my case)).
One of the accounts is 456123 at whatever SIP provider. (This works for all the accounts set up on your SIP phone.)
It is strange, but for this purpose here, it does not matter, which SIP provider this account is tied with.

The DNS name of your SIP phone is xyz.dyndns.org.

You can now call the SIP phone at sip:456123@xyz.dyndns.org.

Of course you yourself have to use a SIP capable phone or software in order to place a call to such an address.

For the FRITZ!Boxes you remove the leading "sip:", so you only enter 456123@xyz.dyndns.org as a phone number on your 1st phone book of your FRITZ!Box, and of course the entry needs a name. The phone book entry will also get a shortcut assigned (that you can alter, if you want to), and you have to leave a (non-ambiguous) shortcut there, even if you don't make direct use of it.
You can than call that remote SIP phone by this shortcut.
On a FRITZ!Fon MT-F you can also call that remote SIP phone "directly" from the FRITZ!Box that 1st phone book visible on the FRITZ!Fon MT-F.

I learned tonight, was, that you can (only) call the callee using the "account names" of the SIP accounts, he has with any resp. all SIP providers (apparently) outside.

I actually hope, there is a way to set up an SIP account on the callee's SIP phone, that is not tied to a SIP provider at all. I don't see the serious reason for that.
There should be a way, the callee answers on accounts, that he does not necessarily hold with SIP providers "outside". But I don't know yet, how to set up such an account on my SIP capable router.
I do actually know, how to set up such an account for the "Local Area Network" of my router, but I don't know yet, how to do this for the "Wide Are Network" side of my router.

To Be Continued …

first things first on Martinique

Got the router working and hooked up on the Internet again, before I went to bed. The customer's ISP imposes non-default PPPoE parameters. which we sorted, but the ISP seems to not want SSH connections, so the packets need a change of tags. Against my hunger I am eating guave, nice baby bananas, and later avocado from the market. Phone battery went below 20%, and reminded me of getting home. I am going to post the journey story so far then. So return here a little later, funny and exciting things wait to get told and read.

FRITZ!Box 7390: a USB printer serving as network printer on a computer running Windows

The instructions in the (German) user manual imply, that the printer was first properly attached to the computer itself. The user manual explains, how to change the settings of the printer configuration, so that you can make use of that printer, which is now attached to the FRITZ!Box.

You can also install it as a network printer right away, but be patient and trust in the Windows set up wizzard.
Let it retrieve the complete list of printers from the Internet, in case your printers are as ancient as mine!
You won't need to tell it, it's port 9100, the Windows installation procedure takes just as long as it announced: several minutes.

FRITZ!Box 7390 "20002484" with Annex A and Annex B and English GUI – it's available right now

I got "mine" this afternoon, found it "somewhere" at the AVM headquarters like 10 minutes away from my place. I got officially numbered "1". It's going to get shipped to Martinique on Sunday (really!).

It comes with a German 220V power supply, "but" with modem and telephone "Bell" adapters. So I guess, you will have to get an appropriate power supply adapter yourself, depending on your country.

I would really love to keep one for myself, I love computers that talk to me in English, and a router/modem with Annex A wouldn't be bad for the next holiday to "Annex A"-land. But then, the firmware for AVM's flagship will always be best-maintained in German. And I do love to press the FRITZ!Box update button on my MT-F. A couple of minutes offline 3 times a week or even more often (you wouldn't believe, how often they provide you with firmware updates!), and there you are: a newborn 7390!

AVM - FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7390 (20002448)

AVM - FRITZ!Box Fon WLAN 7390 (20002448) (That's the "castrated" Germany-only version.)

Both amazon.de (web shop) and Saturn / Berlin / Europa-Center sell it not for EUR 215 resp. EUR 210 (Saturn).

BTW: The Annex A version is due within a couple of days.

FRITZ!Box 7390 "looses" substantial amounts of time during 24 hours

My 7390's firmware version is this: 84.04.85-18065.

There are other issues with the 7390 as well, but it's a solid piece of router / wifi access point / pbx / dect access point / … - I do love my 7390, and I don't want to swap it for anything else.

I didn't experience those firewall attacks again, that I mentioned earlier.

But the box rebooted all off a sudden recently w/o leaving any reasonable or informative message.

Update re lost time:
Changing the NTP server (e.g. to 2.de.pool.ntp.org) seems to help.

Update 2011-01-05 re lost time:
No, changing the NTP server did not really help at all. I am losing about half an hour quite often. The NTP server is now again set to de.pool.ntp.org.
Manually re-connecting the Internet connection under Internet / Online-Monitor helps, if you want to get the time corrected instantly.
But I don't want to imagine, I oversleep a train connection, because my FRITZ!Box initiated alarms on the phones do not occur at the right time.

Programming in Lua

Programming in Lua, Second Edition

I came across Lua recently on my latest FRITZ!Box, where they use it as a compact and tiny scripting language.

Now I decided to make use of my Lua competence and prepare a Lua course as well.

The slides are already created. Where are the participants? Why do you hesitate? Speak up! Where in this world do you want me to present this course on Lua?

Wanderlust, Michael Lopp, and my FRITZ!Box call monitor

Just the way Michael Lopp describes it in his book Being Geek -- The Software Developer's Career Handbook in the section on Wanderlust, I have carried around that idea with me for quite a while, that I would like to be able to see on my phones, from which company somebody is calling, in case I don't have a specific entry for him/her in my address book.

Today I got up and I knew, the feature is actually already implemented. I do maintain a list of country calling codes, which my call monitor actually reads, when it starts up. Today I just understood, that a company's core phone number is just a little longer than a country calling code, but actually my software doesn't mind that. So I started adding company core phone numbers to that list.

And from now on, that should only be rare occasions, where I don't know, from which recruiting company and which location, the recruiter is calling from. I love it.

a call monitor for the FRITZ!Box, using a gmail address book and an area code directory

The FRITZ!Box family of routers also provide telephony services, actually all my phones go through my 7390. They are built using Linux and Busybox. On its TCP/IP port 1012 it offers event records on all telephony actions. Last Christmas I implemented a ruby script dealing with these event records and the "call threads". Yes, there is even a notion of "call threads". At that time I already decided I wanted to use my gmail address book as the data base for looking up all telephone numbers. Now I completed this task. There is a directory of area codes for Germany ("ONB"). I also make use of that one now: For every caller, whose telephone number is not listed in my gmail address book, I show at least from which area he called. I am rather glad with this software.
Initially I also wanted to make this ruby script an OS X cocoa ruby script with a colorful GUI, maybe to run on my iPhone. I'm not sure, whether I will ever be able to work on this.

Update 2010-07-02:
Having my script running now stably for quite a while, it was time for a new feature – somehow.
I have been using procmail for splitting my incoming e-mail for like 13 years or so now.
The procmail rules obviously derive from the addresses I am expecting e-mail messages from.
In former times I had a plug-in for emacs's BBDB, that created raw procmail rules from my emacs address book.
Now with my new approach it makes sense to generate procmail rules from the gmail address book.
Tonight I was in the mood for an little programming excercise, and I implented this feature rather spontaneously. I like it very much.
Right …, generating procmail rules isn't really a proper task for a call monitor, I do know that.

Update 2011-03-28:
This software now makes use of an XML Gmail address book. If you want to find out more on this issue, filter this blog using the tags shown below!

using "buildroot" for re-building a FRITZ!Box Linux kernel and system

I got the silly idea of  mounting a traditional Linux ext2/ext3/ext4 partition on my current FRITZ!Box 7390. I got pointed to buildroot, some nice software, that tries to ease to job of building the compilation toolchain, the libc, the busybox and all that for embedded Linux devices.

Found an article on ... describing exactly my current problem, and tried to explain in this response the software maintainer, how serious the case is. I hope, I find mercy in his eyes ... -- and some support.

Update / 2010-05-18:
Well the current flagship FRITZ!Box, the 7390, is already capable of mounting ext2/ext3 partition all by itself, so no need for building software for exactly this reason. I guess I will find a few more, so I will try again to build cross compilers etc. sooner or later.

creating phone book and diary entries from incoming calls on my router

If you read this title, how mad do you think I am? Honest!

Alright, "as you know" (so of course this article only applies to some sort of computer nerds), my router is a FRITZ!Box 7270, it's also the base station for my (wireless) phones, and a lot more ... -- certainly one of my most important toys or gadgets. And I have 2 of them, one for at home, one for anywhere outside, where I can only connect to the Internet through UMTS.

So alright, back to the title of this article!

• It's nice to record your incoming and outgoing calls in your diary, right? (my diary is emacs style)
• It's nice to get something descriptive displayed on your phone, when somebody calls, right?
• It's nice to extend your phone book through time as easily as possible, right?

Well, my router is running Linux as its operating system kernel, and BusyBox on top of it. On each incoming phone call it runs a shell script with a few parameters, of course the caller's phone# (if available) and also the callee's phone#. (I do have more than one phone#, and why not also record the called phone#, just for the record?) It tries to associate a name with the caller's phone#, if there is a matching entry in the phone book.

Quite a while ago I started implementing such a shell script, and obviously (as it is almost an ordinary (bash) shell script), I can develop and test it on any of my computers, that can run shell scripts, like any of my openSuSE computers, any WinXP computer running cygwin, a Mac running OS X, ... . Yes, I cannot create a full blown shell script, I will not pipe a lot through one-liner perl or ruby scripts on my router, but still: it's a handy and useful, not so tiny shell script.

So far it appears to me, as if no such executable gets called on the router for outgoing calls, but I can still mimic this behaviour by calling that script on my main development box.

Having said this, my script (fritz_box_calllog.sh) fulfills all the requirements, that I listed above in that bullet list.
For incoming calls without caller id and/or without a matching entry in the phone book it creates a piece of XML text, that I can paste into my FRITZ!Box XML phone book, and where I can fill in a phone# and a name or any descriptive text, so next time, I want to dial that phone# myself, I can select it from the phone book. And maybe another time that person will call you with caller id, and then you will be able to greet that person with her/his name. Wouldn't that be nice?

The implementation of this software also got inspired by Matthias Hühne's "Dial!Fritz", that I run on my iPhone. But of course his software is far completer and nicer, and it's well integrated.