SMS gateways allow for the sending and receiving of SMS messages to or from devices and used to provide SMS network connectivity to third parties.You will need a mobile phone (supported) and sms gateway software.
While there are many propreitory solutions ,we went looking for opensource and free software .Kannel and gnokii ended up as best choices.
gnokii works well with many models but simpler the phone better the performance .using symbian phones only adds to complication. Although it supports varierty of protocols like bluetooth,infrared,serial .
We chose nokia 3100 and dku5 cable for the setup .
download the gnokii from its official download site
$ tar zxvf filename.tar.gz && cd gnokiii-xx
$./configure ( this shud tell you if you need to install any dependencies )
$ make && make install ( will finally install ,remember this command will have to be run as root )
now we need to create a config file .a sample file is given in /etc/gnokii/gnokiirc ,copy that file to ~/.gnokiirc
$cp /etc/gnokii/gnokiirc ~/.gnokiirc
now start editing your gnokiirc
sample config file for nokia3100 with dku5 cable is
First find out the port at which the cable is connected ,
$dmesg should tell you ,you must be seeing like /dev/ttyUSB0 most common .
port = /dev/ttyUSB0 model = 6510 connection = dku5
if this doesnt work then you will have to look at dmesg output to see if u see the dlr3p kernel drivier in output .in that case
port = /dev/ttyUSB0 model = 6510
connection = dlr3p
and now you we are all ready to get running .
$gnokii –identify
it should probe and give out the correct details of your mobile .its manufacturer ,model number version OS etc .
then lets try commands.
$gnokii –getsms IN 1 ( should get the latest sms in inbox )
$gnokii –sendsms 98xxxxx should send an sms to that number
$gnokii –help will tell you all the commands available.I tried calling from my gnokii and also attending calls from gnokii .
Now you can couple this with sms to have a complete daemon .smsd uses mysql so rest assured of all the sms sent .
Having said this ,i can tell you .Its not easy we have spent nights trying to get this .It will need a lot of your hacking skills to get anything :-) so happy hacking ! and yeah
#gnokii irc.freenode.net will help u
And why opensource sms solution ? because all the providers charge you nothing less than a lakh for setup .
Now that we have an official Open Solaris user group in our college ,i can find execuses to find computers and free internet .Last weekend i download belenix 0.6.1 and wanted to test it out .So i created some extra gigs on my laptop and installed it out .
Surprising that even though belenix has come out as a full fledged OS,it doesnt have an easy to use GUI installer .It can be difficult especially with partitioning a mistake here can rob you of your entire data on the disk . I tried it out and luckily didn’t screw it up .
After the installation finishes through and it asks for installing grub in mbr ,i say yes and when i reboot i end up with a dreadful GRUB> :( .I so very hate this grub prompt .
And then i had to look for the old commands to find my partition to load from ,and add to that the tabfor kernel path that i usually use in fedora or ubuntu is not there :( .
So,for people who got stuck like me ,here is what you need to do
GRUB> find /boot/grub/stage1
It returns something like ( hd0,2,a) [ for me]
then do
GRUB> root (hd0,2,a)
and it should tell you that the partition is ufs
GRUB> kernel /platform/i86pc/multiboot kernel/unix
It should tell you that kernel has been loaded
GRUB> module /platform/i86pc/boot_archive
GRUB>boot
and now you should see the belenix 0.6.1 booting up.
Apart form this ,belenix is wonderful.light (my laptop has 256 MB ram ) and also contains netbeans ( My fav java IDE) and yeah it obviously comes with DTrace .
And yeah for those with NVidia ,you have compiz too :).
If i have to give it a rating out of 10 i would give it atleast 8 ,and that too only because of its less user friendly installer,somehow installer is the first thing a user sees and it shouldn’t be put off .May be if belenix was a part of code for freedom i would love to write an installer for it in pygtk or gtk for that matter
I definitely suggest people try and use belenix .its not the best but no reasons why it can’t be :)
you can download from here
http://www.genunix.org/distributions/belenix_site/?q=download
[tags]opensolaris,belenix[/tags]
Maintaining a unix/linux based server is not easy ,especially with so many log files and if you were to trace an attack on your system ,it goes from /var/log /whatnot :) .
Many a times when i needed to look at some clean logs like my sendmail logs ,http logs ,looking through the text files can be a horrible experience .
Today i came upon splunk .Its a wonderful tool to analyze log files and provides you with an easy and intuitive user interface .
First the screenshots
And another ..
Steps to get splunk up and running
- Download Link
- tar -zxvf filename.tar.gz
- cd filename
- ./bin/setSplunkEnv
- ./bin/splunk
and now you must be able to run splunk ,and visit the splunk page at http://localhost:8000
Its a very useful and iam sure setting it up :) may be for those who maintain big servers should take a look at it .
[tags]splunk,server[/tags]
The past weekend was spent well,attending podworks.in .For those who don’t know podworks.in is touted to be India’s biggest audio and video podcasting workshop style unconference .
It was well attended by close to 200 professionals and had so much to learn from it .This event was conducted by the knowledge foundation based in chennai ,the team behind the barcamp chennai ,blogcamp,proto.in and many other successful events in chennai .This being a community event ,all the speakers were people who were attending the workshop and it was fun to learn from people who themselves do what they are speaking .
The first day of the workshop focussed on Audio podcasting .
- Introduction ,welcome speech by Kiruba ( The guy behind kirubashow )
- Karthik Kannan spoke about creating a audio podcast in 10 minutes .
The talk comprised of how to use simple tools to acheive this and also professional toolset available.
- The other lecture was by Chinmayee ( RJ/Singer/host on vijay television ).
She talked about how to maintain your body language and voice during a podcast .Tips for having a good voice included drinking less amount of water as possible and preferring to use saliva as the natural fluid lubricant and also to avoid using word/expressions like Ah ,oh ,i see,but ,aana ( tamil) and similar words during a podcast which according to her are orgasmic sounds and unappropriate .
- The next session was tips on using wordpress by sridhar rao,vibeesh and himanshu.
It was disappointing to say the least they talked about creating wordpress.com accounts to start blogging.The topics varied from how easy PHP was ( wonder why they would talk about PHP ) to difference between hosted wordpress blog and your own install . It was quite boring and few people managed to start another session on audacity on the first floor conference hall .That was some fun learning to use audacity ,iam a first time user and it helped one start off .
- The next talk by Sunil Nair ( CEO ,Nautanki.tv) about monetizing your blogs or web content .This was the best talk atleast to me and dealt in depth about how to serve your contents to people and if you should focus on a particular user space on the web .
Then the red bull came in ;) it was nice
- The talks resumed and the it was money again by Mr.Venkatesh ( Sify Manager ) on making monetizing for underprivileged . It was nice to see someone so up the ladder making efforts to reach up to people .
- That was the last and the beach party at ECR was to follow ,however me,alagu ,suren and hari deciding to spend the evening at the marina and we had a great time playing around :) .and the huge sivaji hoarding kept me waiting :D
.
The second kicked off a bit late but was in my opinion a lot better :) .The second day was all about video podcasting .
- First talk by Sridhar Ranganathan the product manager from Y! on how to get your blogs discovered by search engines . He talked about how to add meta information and making your content more reasonable for the bots to be able to ping your site often .
Then followed two wondeful presentations .
- First by Vivin mathew from CNN-IBN on how to make an interesting podcast . he also talked about the usual length of podcast and how to make it more appealing by choosing the places to shoot and how to strip down the original content and get your audience attention . You can watch the video taken by alagu here
Vivin Mathew at Podworks.in from Allagappan M on Vimeo
- Then was a super session from Mr.Shashi Kumar a freelance cameraman for NAT-GEO and also the man behing Chennai -600028 movie .He talked about the basics of making a perfect picture ( terms like aperture,frame,line of sight ) and also urging people not to look too deep into the basics and to learn it by the way of actually doing it.Something he admits is how he became one .He never finished a course on photigraphy :) .
Shashikumar @ Podworks.in from Allagappan M on VimeoPost lunch it was a small concert by Krish Ashok with his violin and he was great :) although hi didn’t look like a violin guy ( he wore a iron maiden tshirt ) .
Then there was a talk on making educational podcasts which obviously would benefit many people and the day was called off :) .
Not before everyone signed the huge board with their remarks and group photos taken .
In all ,it was a wonderful show and iam sure all of them loved it .Wishing for an equally wonderful second event .
You can see more pics at Flickr and video at youtube .
Technorati Tags: podworks, podworks.in, chennai
