Author: Patrick

GPRS with Nokia 9300i, Gentoo and China mobile (2, OpenRC)

Since I moved my laptop to the new OpenRC init framework, my GPRS connection stopped working. At first I didn’t know what needed to be changed, but after having a careful look at /usr/share/doc/openrc/net.example and adjusting the proposed ppp chat script, I got it up and running again. Here is my configuration:

### GPRS ###

config_ppp0=( "ppp" )

link_ppp0="/dev/rfcomm0"

pppd_ppp0=(
        "noauth"        # Do not require the peer to authenticate itself
        "debug"
        "local"         # Ignore carrier detect signal from the modem

        "defaultroute"  # Make this PPP interface the default route
        "usepeerdns"    # Use the DNS settings provided by PPP

        "lcp-echo-interval 15"  # Send a LCP echo every 15 seconds
        "lcp-echo-failure 3"    # Make peer dead after 3 consective
                                                        # echo-requests

        "lock"                          # Lock serial port
        "115200"                        # Set the serial port baud rate
        "crtscts"                       # Enable hardware flow control
)

chat_ppp0="
ABORT BUSY
ABORT ERROR
ABORT 'NO ANSWER'
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT 'NO DIALTONE'
ABORT 'Invalid Login'
ABORT 'Login incorrect'
'' AT
TIMEOUT 5
OK 'ATH'
OK 'ATE1'
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,\"IP\",\"cmnet\"'
OK 'ATD*99#'
TIMEOUT 60
CONNECT ''
TIMEOUT 5
~-- ''
"

Uploading mail to an IMAP server with Thunderbird (2.0.0.14) sucks – perl script to the rescue

Today I was trying to upload a lot of mail (something like 160000 mails stored in a deeply nested folder structure of about 13000 folders) to an IMAP server. Those mails were converted from the Eudora mailbox format to a more sane Eudora mailbox format using “Eudora rescue”, and then imported into Thunderbird’s “Local folders”. From there, so we thought, it would only be a matter of minutes to put those mails onto the newly setup dovecot IMAP server, with one drag-and-drop action.

But…

The upload horribly failed after the 3rd folder or so, with no error message whatsoever. No matter what I tried, it would just fail silently. The debug logging (see Debugging/Thunderbird article in the Dovecot wiki) didn’t help, and neither did dovecot’s log on the server. The problem seems to be connected with creating folders on the server somehow – because uploading a big amount (400 for a small test) mails within one folder wasn’t a problem. I couldn’t find out if Thunderbird or dovecot is to blame here…

I eventually managed to get this big pile of mail to the server by using a perl script that I found on perlmonks.org. Thanks to Davis for providing this! I downloaded it, installed the Mail::MboxParser and Mail::IMAPClient dependencies (with two ‘cpan install …’ calls), changed the configuration in the script to our site’s data and ran it. ~30 minutes later, the mails were on the server. Only thing that could have been better: All mails were ‘marked as unread’ – but that’s easy to fix.

Update:
After looking into the perl code, I found a way to ‘mark as read’ during the transfer. I posted it under the original perlmonks.org script as a comment.

My instant messaging communications platform

I’m using this setup for quite a while now. It’s great in many ways – here some of the reasons:

  • I can access it from multiple hosts at once
  • I can use one unified user interface for all instant messenger protocols and IRC
  • I can access the platform even through my mobile phone via GPRS / WLAN
  • I have logs of all communications in one central place

This is how a few free software components work together to make it possible:

Overview (OpenDocument format)

Or as PNG file (rendered with GIMP):
Overview (PNG)