Enjoying the BOSSA 2009 conference

This year's BOSSA incarnation has once again turned out as an excellent event. It was good to meet and talk again with a number of people like Marcel Holtmann or Rasterman.

This year it seems the organizers went out of their way to please every speaker. Since their conference shirts were available in three colors (but not black), they actually prepared a special edition of a black t-shirt for me.

It will be important to see how many other conferences can live up to that standard ;)

OpenBSC now has a Cisco/zebra/quagga style telnet interface

Since I'm currently at the BOSSA conference and thus basically on a break in my Brazil holidays, I decided I might as well get some work done and imported the zebra/quagga VTY code into OpenBSC. I used a fork of that code that I used some time ago for a never-announced (but in my public svn) 'cardshell' project.

What this means is that we now have a quite nice shell interface into OpenBSC, where you can interactively explore the data structures with commands like 'show bts 0', 'show e1_line' or 'show timeslot'. Over time, I hope we can easily add also interactive commands for [re]configuration, i.e. reconfigure the BTS on the fly, change administrative state via OML, or set TEI/timeslot configurations or the like.

Importing those bits from zebra/quagga has the advantage the we have things like a history and tab-completion without having to spend much time on it. Also, we can use the same codebase for saving/restoring the current configuration from/to a text file.

To give you an idea, it looks like this:

ideapad.de.gnumonks.org> show bts
BTS 0 is of nanobts900 type, has LAC 1, TSC 7 and 1 TRX
  NM State: Oper 'RFU', Admin 0, Avail 'In test'
  Site Mgr NM State: Oper 'RFU', Admin 0, Avail 'In test'
  Paging: FIXME pending requests, 100 free slots
  E1 Signalling Link:
    E1 Line 0, Timeslot 1, Type OML
    E1 TEI 0, SAPI 255

ideapad.de.gnumonks.org> show trx
TRX 0 of BTS 0 is on ARFCN 123
  NM State: Oper 'RFU', Admin 0, Avail 'In test'
  Baseband Transceiver NM State: Oper 'RFU', Admin 0, Avail 'In test'
  E1 Signalling Link:
    E1 Line 0, Timeslot 2, Type RSL
    E1 TEI 0, SAPI 0

ideapad.de.gnumonks.org> show timeslot 0 0 0
Timeslot 0 of TRX 0 in BTS 0, phys cfg CCCH+SDCCH4
  NM State: Oper 'RFU', Admin 0, Avail 'In test'
  Bound IP: 0.0.0.0 Port 0 FC=0 F8=0