Attending HITCON and COSCUP in Taipei

It is my pleasure to attend the HITCON 2013 and COSCUP 2013 conferences in July/August this year. They are both in Taipei. HITCON is a hacker/security event, while COSCUP is a pure Free/Open Source Software conference.

At both events I will be speaking at the growing list of GSM related tools that are available these days, like OpenBSC, OsmcoomBB, SIMtrace, OsmoSGSN, OsmoBTS, OsmoSDR, etc. As they are both FOSS projects and useful in a security context, this fits well within the scope of both events.

Given that I'm going to be back to Taiwan, I'm looking very much forward to meeting old friends and former colleagues from my Openmoko days in Taipei. God, do I miss those days. While terribly stressful, they still are the most exciting days of my career so far.

And yes, I'm also going to use the opportunity for a continuation of my motorbike riding in this beautiful country.

Syndicated 2013-06-05 02:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog

Rest In Peace, Atul Chitnis

Today, very sad news has reached me: Atul Chitnis has passed away. Most people outside of India will most likely not recognize the name: He has been instrumental in pineering the BBS community in India, and the founder and leader of the Linux Bangalore and later FOSS.in conferences, held annually in Bangalore.

I myself first met Atul about ten years ago, and had the honor of being invited to speak at many of the conferences he was involved in. Besides that professional connection, we became friends. The warmth and affection with which I was accepted by him and his family during my many trips to Bangalore is without comparison. I was treated and accepted like a family member, despite just being this random free software hacker from Germany who is always way too busy to return the amount of kindness.

Despite the 17 year age difference, there was a connection between the two of us. Not just the mutual respect for each others' work, but something else. It might have been partially due to his German roots. It might have been the similarities in our journey through technology. We both started out in the BBS community with analog modems, we both started to write DOS software in the past, before turning to Linux. We both became heavily involved in mobile technology around the same time: He during his work at Geodesic, I working for Openmoko. Only in recent years his indulgence in Apple products was slightly irritating ;)

Only five weeks ago I had visited Atul. Given the state of his health, it was clear that this might very well be the last time that we meet each other. I'm sad that this now actually turned out to become the thruth. It would have been great to meet again at the end of the year (the typical FOSS.in schedule).

My heartfelt condolences to his family. Particularly to his wonderful wife Shubha, his daughther Anjali, his mother and brother. [who I'm only not calling by their name in this post as they deserve some privacy and their Identities is not listed on Atuls wikipedia page].

Atul was 51 years old. Way too young to die. Yet, he has managed to created a legacy that will extend long beyond his life. He profoundly influenced generations of technology enthusiasts in India and beyond.

• CIOL: Open Soruce guru Atul Chitnis, 51, no more
• NDTV Gadgets: Shine on, You Crazy Diamond: Atul Chitnis (1962-2013)
• lwn.net notice
• dna India: Atul Chitnis's death moves people
• Firstpost: Indian tech world mounrs death of open source guru Atul Chitnis
• NextBigWhat: R.I.P Atul Chntins: The Man Who Changed the Open Source World

Syndicated 2013-06-03 02:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog

OsmoDevCon 2013 preparation update

OsmoDevCon 2013 is getting closer every day, and I'm very much looking forward to meet the fellow developers of the various Osmcoom sub-projects. Organization-wise, the catering has now been sorted out, and Holger has managed to get a test license for two ARFCN from the regulatory body without any trouble.

This means that we're more or less all set. The key needs to be picked up from IN-Berlin, and we need to bring some extra extension cords, ethernet switch, power cords and other gear, but that's really only very minor tasks.

There's not as much formal schedule as we used to have last year, which is good as I hope it means we can focus on getting actual work done, as opposed to spending most of the time updating one another about our respective work and progress.

Syndicated 2013-03-29 01:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog

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

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.

Syndicated 2013-03-29 01:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog

Update on what I've been doing

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 ;)

Syndicated 2013-02-08 01:00:00 from Harald Welte's blog