- retronet-octoi - lists.osmocom.org

RetroNetCall on Jul 5, 2023: Teletext
by Harald Welte 03 Jul '23

03 Jul '23

Dear Osmocom community, we're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall[1], the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall[2]. when: Jul 5, 2023 at 20:00 CEST where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall This time, @casandro will be presenting on Teletext: A digital medium transcending a factor of 10e6 in technical progress NOTE: Teletext (covered here) is the service transporting textual information alongside TV broadcast signals. It is not to be confused with the completely unrelated Teletex (subject of previous RetroNetCall)! This meeting will have the following schedule: 20:00 meet + greet 20:10 presentation as outlined above 21:00 unstructured supplementary social event [3] Attendance is free of charge and open to anyone with an interest in Osmocom or open source cellular technologies. More information about RetroNetCall, including the schedule for further upcoming events can be found at https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall Looking forward to meeting you soon! Best regards, Harald [1] https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall [2] https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-dev-con/wiki/OsmoDevCall [3] this is how we started to call the "unstructured" part of osmocom developer conferences in the past, basically where anyone can talk about anything, no formal schedule or structure. -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)osmocom.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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RetroNetCall on Jun 7, 2023: Teletex
by Harald Welte 07 Jun '23

07 Jun '23

Dear Osmocom community, we're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall[1], the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall[2]. when: Jun 7, 2023 at 20:00 CEST where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall This time, @laforge will be presenting on Teletex: The brief abandoned step between Telex and Telefax Everyone knows Telefax, and most people will have heard what Telex was. Few people are aware of the designated intermediate system Teletex. It was used like a "remote type writer", where formatted pages of (monospaced) text could be entered, transmitted and printed by a remote typewriter This meeting will have the following schedule: 20:00 meet + greet 20:10 presentation as outlined above 21:00 unstructured supplementary social event [3] Attendance is free of charge and open to anyone with an interest in Osmocom or open source cellular technologies. More information about RetroNetCall, including the schedule for further upcoming events can be found at https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall Looking forward to meeting you soon! Best regards, Harald [1] https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall [2] https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-dev-con/wiki/OsmoDevCall [3] this is how we started to call the "unstructured" part of osmocom developer conferences in the past, basically where anyone can talk about anything, no formal schedule or structure. -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)osmocom.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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RetroNetCall on May 4, 2023: E1 - The analog side (part 1)
by Harald Welte 01 May '23

01 May '23

Dear Osmocom community, we're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall[1], the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall[2]. when: May 4, 2023 at 20:00 CEST where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall This time, @tnt will be presenting on E1: The analog side (part 1) Many of us know E1 circuits from ISDN or GSM A-bis, and are familiar with the digital side of them. Building a related E1 interface mostly uses [still] available LIU (Line Interface Unit) integrated circuits. @tnt took it one step further and started to think along the lines of what if I had to do my own LIU analog circuit design? This meeting will have the following schedule: 20:00 meet + greet 20:10 presentation as outlined above 21:00 unstructured supplementary social event [3] Attendance is free of charge and open to anyone with an interest in Osmocom or open source cellular technologies. More information about RetroNetCall, including the schedule for further upcoming events can be found at https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall Looking forward to meeting you soon! Best regards, Harald [1] https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall [2] https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-dev-con/wiki/OsmoDevCall [3] this is how we started to call the "unstructured" part of osmocom developer conferences in the past, basically where anyone can talk about anything, no formal schedule or structure. -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)osmocom.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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RetroNetCall on March 1, 2023: Introduction to the X.21 interface
by Harald Welte 28 Feb '23

28 Feb '23

Dear Osmocom community, we're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall[1], the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall[2]. when: March 1, 2023 at 20:00 CET where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall This time, @laforge will be presenting on Introduction to the X.21 Interface Topics include (not limited to): * electrical signals * signal timing * call signaling This meeting will have the following schedule: 20:00 meet + greet 20:10 presentation as outlined above 21:00 unstructured supplementary social event [3] Attendance is free of charge and open to anyone with an interest in Osmocom or open source cellular technologies. More information about RetroNetCall, including the schedule for further upcoming events can be found at https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall Looking forward to meeting you soon! Best regards, Harald [1] https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall [2] https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-dev-con/wiki/OsmoDevCall [3] this is how we started to call the "unstructured" part of osmocom developer conferences in the past, basically where anyone can talk about anything, no formal schedule or structure. -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)osmocom.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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RetroNetCall on Dec 7, 2022: ISDN B-channel protocols
by Harald Welte 02 Dec '22

02 Dec '22

Dear Osmocom community, we're happy to announce the next incarnation of RetroNetCall[1], the retronetworking oriented spin-off of OsmoDevCall[2]. when: December 7, 2022 at 20:00 CET where: https://osmocom.org/RetroNetCall This time, @laforge will be presenting on ISDN B-channel protocols: V.110, V.120, X.75, H.221 Topics include (not limited to): * description of the respective protocol * look at a protocol trace * status of open source implementations This meeting will have the following schedule: 20:00 meet + greet 20:10 presentation as outlined above 21:00 unstructured supplementary social event [3] Attendance is free of charge and open to anyone with an interest in Osmocom or open source cellular technologies. More information about OsmoDevCall, including the schedule for further upcoming events can be found at https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-dev-con/wiki/OsmoDevCall Looking forward to meeting you soon! Best regards, Harald [1] https://osmocom.org/projects/retronetworking/wiki/RetroNetCall [2] https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-dev-con/wiki/OsmoDevCall [3] this is how we started to call the "unstructured" part of osmocom developer conferences in the past, basically where anyone can talk about anything, no formal schedule or structure. -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)osmocom.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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RFC: Reviving OsmoDevCall
by Harald Welte 25 Jun '22

25 Jun '22

[please follow-up-to openbsc(a)lists.osmocom.org so we don't cross-post all related mails] Dear Osmocom community, OsmoDevCall used to be rather successful for quite some time in recent years, but recently has been suffering quite a bit due to insufficient people volunteering to present. Big thanks to all who did! Interestingly, there's no shortage of ideas of topics at https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-dev-con/wiki/OsmoDevCall - but then many of the potential speakers did not have the interest or time to follow-up. Most recently, the last few instances have not been taking place due to a lack of volunteers during my holidays. Last, but not least, while during COVID lockdown winter "friday night 8pm" was a good idea, this of course is more difficult during the summer, when people are more likely want to go out the weekend. So, to summarize, let me ask some questions: * would you be interested in OsmoDevCall continuing? * which day/time/timezone would you prefer ? * would you be able and willing to volunteer to give at talk within the next 3 or so months? Any other suggestions for or around OsmoDevCall are of course also welcome. Thanks in advance, Harald -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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Retronetworking exhibit @ VCFB 2022: Help wanted
by Harald Welte 25 Jun '22

25 Jun '22

Hi all, Vintage Computing Festival Berlin 2022 is scheduled for October 8+9, 2022 It would be great to put together an exhibit there, re-using the small rack based setup that was at the 2019 CCC congress (Auerswald PBX, Freeswitch, Portmaster3) as well as a number of modems / ISDN-TA etc. to show BBS dial-up and the like. I have all the equipment and can work on the preparation/setup, but I think it would be very helpful if this was not a one-man show but if somebody would be around to help particularly on-site when there are visitors looking for demo, explanation, help, ... Registration deadline is September 7, as indicated at https://vcfb.de/2022/call_for_participation.htm Before we go into what we could/should demo, I would like to get a feeling if anyone is interested in helping out. Related redmine issue: https://osmocom.org/issues/5590 -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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OsmoDevCall on Apr 29, 2022: Osmocom Community TDMoIP (OCTOI)
by Harald Welte 22 Apr '22

22 Apr '22

Dear Osmocom community, It's my pleasure to announce the next OsmoDevCall (delayed by one week from our usual spot) on April 29, 2022 at 20:00 CEST at https://meeting5.franken.de/b/har-xbc-bsx-wvs In this edition, I will be presenting on the state of the OCTOI (Osmocom TDMoIP) Retronetworking activities (see https://osmocom.org/projects/octoi/wiki) This meeting will have the following schedule: 20:00 meet + greet 20:10 presentation as outlined above 21:00 unstructured supplementary social event [*] Attendance is free of charge and open to anyone with an interest in Osmocom or open source cellular technologies. More information about OsmoDevCall, including the schedule for further upcoming events can be found at https://osmocom.org/projects/osmo-dev-con/wiki/OsmoDevCall Looking forward to meeting you soon! Best regards, Harald [*] this is how we started to call the "unstructured" part of osmocom developer conferences in the past, basically where anyone can talk about anything, no formal schedule or structure. -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)osmocom.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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OCTOI status + next TODOs
by Harald Welte 20 Apr '22

20 Apr '22

Hi! == Welcome / Mailing List / Forum == so far most of the OCTOI (Osmocom Community TDMoIP) related communication has been happening on the #retronetworking IRC channel on libera.chat. That's nice, but it is also quite "volatile" as not everyone is there all the time, and we have no public searchable archive of it, etc. So I would like to start the discussions here on the mailing list. If you guys prefer, we can also switch to the web-based forums I crated in redmine at https://osmocom.org/projects/octoi/boards I personally am more a mailing list person, but I'm happy to use whatever is most accepted. I'd like to share some general status update on OCTOI... == OCTOI phase one == The central OCTOI hub has been a machine called 'divo' which is located in the basement of my Berlin home. IT has a Digium TE820 card for 8 physical E1 circuits. * one to my own Auerswald COMmander basic2 PBX connecting my phones/modems * one to my Portmaster3 providing a variety of modem/isdn dial-up services * one to an icE1usb connecting manawyrm * one to an icE1usb connecting gruetzkopf * one to an icE1usb connecting roox * one to an icE1usb connecting cquirin The central 'switch' is at least currently a yate installation on divo. This has been operational for at least a few weeks, and we've been testing voice calls, ISDN video calls, modem calls and ISDN dialup. For analog modem the most critical part was the phase errors introduced by lack of recovery from packet re-ordering in earlier versions of the OCTOI support in osmo-e1d. == OCTOI phase 1b: RIFO == More recently, we upgraded that software to include the "RIFO" (random in, first out) to properly deal with packet re-ordering on the small scale we're seeing it in those links. This has reportedly increased the quality and reliability of modem calls. The one difficult part of those connections above is that they all need one physical E1 circuit at my end, together with a physical icE1usb and the related host computer with sufficient full-speed USB bandwidth to drive it. == OCTOI phase 2: trunkdev == This has led to the development of dahdi-trunkdev. This is a virtual DAHDI driver. It plugs into DAHDI like any other driver, offering the usual per-timeslot "channel" devices. But instead of driving some real E1 hardware, it simply multiplexes/demultiplexes the 32 timeslots into E1 frames which are then accessible to a Linux userspace program via new 'trunkdev' character devices. Code can be found at https://gitea.osmocom.org/retronetworking/dahdi-linux/src/branch/laforge/tr… This now meant that osmo-e1d could be modified to not talk to a physical icE1usb device, but instead to this DAHDI trunkdev. Code is at https://gitea.osmocom.org/retronetworking/osmo-e1d/src/branch/laforge/trunk… The combination of dahdi-trunkdev and osmo-e1d trunkdev support now allows the provisioning of purely virtual trunks: No more need for a physical E1 cirtuit or osmo-e1d on my end, allowing easy scale-out to more users. I've only tested this code in DAHDI-to-DAHDI situations looking as follows: Side A: e1-prbs-test - DAHDI - trunkdev - osmo-e1d <-- OCTOI identical Side B: e1-prbs-test - DAHDI - trunkdev - osmo-e1d <-- OCTOI What we need in the real world is the following setup Side A (hub): e1-prbs-test - DAHDI - trunkdev - osmo-e1d <-- OCTOI Side B (user): PBX/... - icE1usb - osmo-e1d <-- OCTOI I didn't test/verify this setup yet at my end in the lab. However, we have two new users who are connected this way now: * drdeke * tmwapl == divo machine death == Two days ago now the 'divo' machine on my side died. I narrowed it down to either the CPU or the mainboard. As I don't have matching spare parts for those, I first tried to migrate to another physical machine I had sitting on a shelf, but that exhibited some other problem. So now 'divo' is a kvm virtual machine running on an EPYC server, using SRV-IO to map USB host controllers (for icE1usb), TE820 and even the NIC into the guest OS. It uses the original SSD from the old divo machine, so no data was lost and the existing setup is matched 1:1 Unless we see problems with this approach (I don't expect any), this VM based setup will likely remain until the data center migration (see below). == TODO / What needs to be done now == Right now the most critical parts to do are: 1) to test the reliability of the network in general (particularly with the RIFO). 2) to verify that trunkdev works as well as the physical setup It is important that we get more "measurable" results than "I created a modem call and it was stable for 30mins". Ideas on that: 1) disconnect some of the user trunks from the yate/ISDN setup and run them with e1-prbs-test at both ends to get some idea on the bit error rate over at least 24 hours 2) most urgently, add more statistics / counters to osmo-e1d and set up some kind of aggregaion/graphing for those. In the libosmo* universe, we have infrastructure for stat_items and rate_counters, as well as a statsd reporter that can expose those values. So this task boils down to a) identifying the metrics that we should expose and implement them. b) configure the statsd exporter to actually expose them c) some setup for collecting those values and plotting/analyzing them. Help is needed wit all of those tasks. For '1' I can only run one side of the link, of course. For '2', unless somebody throws themselves at it, I'm happy to do 'a' as I'm most familiar with the code. 'b' is a no-brainer. But for 'c' I would really appreciate if somebody else could take this over, as I'm not familiar with grafana/prometheus or whatever people want to use for that. == Later: Migration to data center co-location == Once that is clear, we can add more users, and can work towards migrating the entire setup away from my basement and into a co-located date center. noris.net has kindly offered to host the setup. They are a south German data center operator who originally started as a small ISP, and for whom the 'u-isdn' Linux ISDN stack was originally created. The founders are still involved, so there certainly is some good will to help along our retronetworking efforts. The physical machine will likely be sponsored by my company sysmocom, unless some unforeseen other option turns up. There's no clear schedule (and also no rush) for this migration, but I want to do this in the next few months unless we see serious stability issues that need to be resolved first. Happy hacking, Harald -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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Welcome / Current State
by Harald Welte 07 Mar '22

07 Mar '22

Dear List, this is the first post to this list, just to get the discussion started and to let you know that there has been good progress in recent weeks on the Osmocom Community TDMoIP network. We have a prototype network as can be seen in the diagram at https://osmocom.org/projects/octoi/wiki/Community_TDMSS7_Network#Currnet-Ne… - primary users so far are manawyrm in Kiel/Germany and myself in Berlin/Germany Via the Portmaster3 one can dial into a variety of BBSs (the portmaster forwards via Telnet based on the called number), see https://www.ckts.info/directory/europe/continent/ (search for Germany / 30 / 12343xxx) for the current listing. ISDN data calls are quite stable, even through the remote TDMoIP. For analog modem connections (at least V.9x) via TDMoIP, we need to resolve the proper handling of packet re-ordering (https://osmocom.org/issues/5432) as we see a few of them and they tend to be rather destructive. We definitely need a lot more testing and the experimental osmo-e1d based code for the protocol needs a lot of improvements for wider deployment, but things are coming together rather nicely. In case anyone has ISDN PRI equipment and wants to connect, feel free to reach out. Regards, Harald p.s.: #retronetworking on libera.chat is where most of the communication related to this project is happening. -- - Harald Welte <laforge(a)gnumonks.org> http://laforge.gnumonks.org/ ============================================================================ "Privacy in residential applications is a desirable marketing option." (ETSI EN 300 175-7 Ch. A6)

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