Dear Ladies and Gentlemen, my fellow crawlbots…

Hello everyone. So far, so well, i’m feeling lazy. There ist nothing to do, and I don’t know how to go on. This is not a very nice feeling.

But things even get worse: Some days ago I noticed that the apache on my rootserver wasn’t responding as expected, so I had a look into the system and the running processes. I was very shocked when I saw a bunch of warbot scripts and friends and further more some unfriendly webserver running with www-data privileges (and serving SEVERAL backdoors). I’d been hacked! I the meantime I was able to track the error down to the mambo CMS serving www.jpoetry.net. Lately I was much too lazy to update it and so it got exploited. Currently i’m newly setting up everything with even less privileges, moving Jpoetry.net to the stories.jpoetry.net CMS. Its a lot of work…

’til then. Your starseeker

Hi there… its been a while since I wrote something on technotrends… so here we go.
Some while ago, I finally finished the Fnordlicht I bought at the congress. It works really nice but its hard to take photos from it with MY less professtional digital photo cameras ;). So just look at the pictures and feel good about it. Its really nice.
Yesterday at my Job (HEY! I’m working for my old company AGAIN ;)) i found two boxes, not very light, with stuff in them I could hardly believe. There were manuals for some devolo/elsa devices i posess… and already worked really hard on. (If you ever tried to figure out how to enable CallerID in an ELSA Microlink ISDN/TL V.34 or similar and you DO NOT have the Manual (as I did): Try setting S-Register 153 to some other value. 6 works fine for me… but i’ll explain that later on.). When i asked if i yould take them home, I got the devices matching the manuals as well (an Devolo Microlink ISDN i and an Devolo Microlink 56k i (industrial RS232-connected PSTN Data/Fax (for the 56k i even Voice) Equiptment with nice features an a really really great documentation).). Since I already had the predecessor of the Devolo MicroLink ISDN i (the Elsa MicroLink ISDN/TL V.34) and I cant stand this oldfashioned Serial Stuff, I took it all home. At home I read that the ISDN i (other than the ISDN/TL V.34) can not serve analog calls and is thus nearly worthless for me :(. I am still one of those old-fashioned analog telephone guys and like dialing into my network with my good old Modem :). So i had to think of a new setup… currently i have the ISDN i attached for testing purposes at the Dialup line and the 56k i connected at the VOCP Voice Info line. This might change some time ;).

Now to CallerID on the ISDN TA’s from Elsa (known to work with the Elsa Microlink ISDN/TL V.34 and the Devolo Microlink ISDN i):
To make CallerID work on that TA’s (if it has been disabled by the previous owner and written to NVRAM (on older firmware Versions AT&F won’t touch the S153 register… so it won’t reset to “enabled” state :/) ) you have to set S-Register 153 to a new appropriate Value. Since Register 153 is documented as “CONNECT/NO CARRIER message” in the manual, looking for CallerID won’t work out. Its a bit orientated Register, so we have to set the individual Bits. Its not that much trouble with the TA’s. The possible values and their meanings are shown below (defaults are bold). Set the Register 153 with ATS153.[bit]=0 or 1. You may also use ATS153=[sum of values of bity you want to set to 1]

• Bit 0 (value 1): 0: CallerID of the remote station is NOT displayed after a CONNECT - 1: CallerID is displayed after a CONNECT.
• Bit 1 (value 2): 0: CallerID of the remote station is NOT displayed after a RING - 1: CallerID is displayed after a RING.
• Bit 2 (value 4): 0: NO Display of the EAZ/MSN selected by the remote station - 1: With Bit 0 and/or Bit 1 =1, the selected EAZ/MSN is displayed after the appropriate message (either after RING (for Bit 1=1) or CONNECT (for Bit 0=1) or even if both are =1 ;)). (So without bit 0 or 1 set to 1, this has no effect at all!)
• Bit 3-5 are reserved for internal use. Effects are UNKNOWN and you should probalby leave them untouched.
• Bit 6 (value 64): 0: NO Display of the messages ALERTING, CALL SENT and CONNECTING - 1: Display of the mentioned messages… (please do not set this until your software or dialup script knows how to deal with it. Most software might end up not connecting anymore because it expects CONNECTED, but gets ALERTING before gettingt CONNECTED. This might mess things up a bit. Even though its very helpful for debugging purposes)
• Bit 7 (value 128): 0: Cause of an aborted connection is NOT displayed - 1: Cause of the aborted connection is displayed by S154/S155 after NO CARRIER message. (This might also be misinterpreted by the software but can help you out if you don’t know why you are not able to connect. You can still display these values using “AT S154? S155?” even if this bit is 0)

You can set the options each one by itself by specifying the bit you want to set in the AT Command… for example use ATS153.1=1 to set bit 1 to 1. Older TA’s might not support that but its not that bad. You can add up the bit values to a decimal value for the whole tegister byte. This will set _ALL_ bits. For example if you want CallerID and EAZ/MSN Display after each RING but you do NOT want it after CONNECT, and you do NOT want ALERTING, CALL SENT and CONNECTING and disconnection causes, Add up the values for bit 1 (2) and bit 2 (4) to the byte value 6 and set it to the register: ATS153=6. This will set all bits to 0 except of bit 1 and bit 2. Do not forget to save the values to NVRAM with AT*W or AT&W to prevent them from vanishing.

I took this from the manuals because some people looked for it in numerous forums and its really not that easy to find in the manuals if you are looking for CallerID. I hope it works for you. Many other TA’s or modems with CallerID Support use the AT#CID or AT%CCID Commands (or other generic AT Commands without any use of the S-registers) for controlling display of the CallerID. Some older revisions of the ISDN/TL V.34 respond to some of those commands with a OK when in Fax mode but don’t change the value in the register (or the value of the command) from 0 to something appropriate. This nearly drove me mad several times, so do NOT wonder why this is, just don’t use these commands. They will _not_ work!

The Starseeker

Hi…
perhaps you read the last entry about me being uncomfortable about university life and things tied up with that. I finally decided not to go into the second semester. This is because I recognized, that I am not really made for being a teacher which has several causes, I already told the people that need to know. Its a bit sad but I think I’ll get over it.
What should I do instead? I thought of becoming a sound engineer or a system administrator… perhaps both ;). Future will show what matches me better. If you have a job or a practical… or even better an apprenticeship training position, please let me know.

The Starseeker

Hello… welcome in 2006. New year has started without any harms… except that I am very very unwilling to go to the university again… somethings telling me I messed up everything very very badly. The fact that due to a defective heating i caught a cold and, due to some other issues all my lectures didn’t take place anyway, made me very happy but very uncertain also. But thats another thing to talk about in some other context…
Eimann, Jakob and Jiska took me to the new year and i am very happy and thankful of that. I haven’t had such a beatiful new years eve in any year before. Thank you again.
The 22C3 was also very great… but i’ll leave it at that. Thousands of other blogs will tell you about it.. so I won’t bother you anymore.

When I returned from the 22C3 and opened the door to my room, I fainted immediately and fell backwards into a deep hole of depression about how my room looks… this happens every year, but this year it was even worse, because I had two visitors… Jakob and Jiska were staying here some nights… and I was really embarressed.
So I thought that if you can hunt bugs in the PC, there might be a possibility to hunt bugs in the real world (in my room). Clearly speaking: I HAD TO TIDY THINGS UP A LOT!

Even if its even more embarrassing, there was a real bug!

It took me two days (while having a cold) to clean up everything. It started with my 2 neat trashcans… that were full of “Happyness” about seeing me again ;).

This was the state BEFORE I started to clean up.

Now I’ll let the pictures talk. I’ve taken some nice “Before < -> After” series:

The path door to bed:

Before….

After…

The corner my Fileserver resides:

Before….

After…

My shelves:

Before….

After…

And my wardrobe:

Before….

After…

As you might have noticed, the pictures labled “After…” carry a bit more tidynes than the pictures labled “Before…”. I, surprisingly, didn’t trash or hide all the stuff missing… I don’t even know by myself where I put it… strange isn’t it? But now I can feel home again in this rooms.

The Starseeker