HYPERAXE

After much tinkering on making Kannel work on a Linux box and use a GSM phone as a SMSC, well sad to say I had no luck in doing so. It seems to me that the available GSM phone data cables we have in the office are not compatible with the linux drivers and Kannel. Since I’m on a tight deadline I didn’t have that much luxury to spend several days just to make it work.

So what I did is to install Kannel on Cygwin running on a Windows 2000 server. At least this way, I don’t have to worry about the linux drivers for my data cables since I can use the Windows native drivers for it. Moreover, I can also make use of bluetooth connection by emulating a serial connection between the PC and the mobile phone. The available GSM phone I have is a Nokia 6230 and I decided to make use of the data cable instead of the bluetooth connection. Regarding the drivers for the data cable, it’s included on the latest Nokia PC Suite.

Here’s the step I did on making things work.

1. Download the latest stable release of Kannel (Cygwin build) from their website.
2. Build Kannel using the online documentation from Kannel’s site.
3. Wrote my own kannel.conf file for a customized version for my needs.
4. Connected the phone and data cable to the USB port of my PC.
5. Started bearerbox and smsbox.

Well, that did the trick and I was able to start sending/receiving SMS messages using Kannel either through the the HTTP interface or through my Java application.

For those having problems and would like to know the details of my installation, just contact me and I would be more than willing to help you out.

[tags]Kannel, Cygwin, SMS, MMS, Linux, Windows, Java, Nokia, Nokia 6230, GSM, mobile phone, WAP[/tags]

I just finished installing a Squid Proxy Server in one of my Linux boxes to be used in our office next week. This is due to the hassles that our PLDT myDSL Biz plan for our office Internet connection is causing us.

For some reason, there are several sites that myDSL can’t connect to. For now I just found 2 sites which we can’t connect to, namely http://javaverified.com and http://www.squid-cache.org . We can live not being able to access the Squid Proxy Server website but for the Java Verification website, well it’s an important site we need access to for our J2ME applications to be Java certified. I’m not really sure why PLDT’s network can’t access several sites, but based on some research on the net many users are experiencing the same problem and PLDT doesn’t seem to be doing anything about this. I had no choice then but to setup a proxy server on a Linux box from another network just to solve these problems PLDT is causing us.

Oh well, we are also awaiting another DSL connection from Eastern Telecoms which hopefully will be up and running next week. So for now I just have to live with the hassles PLDT has to offer.

[tags]Squid Proxy Server, Squid, Java Verified, Java, Linux, PLDT, myDSL, myDSL Biz, DSL, Internet Connection, Networking, J2ME[/tags]