The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung has just published an article about how Rhizomatica provides rural cellular telephony in Oaxaca, Mexico using the Osmocom cellular-infrastructure projects.
You can read the (German) article here
This is a review of the most significant changes and events in the Osmocom Cellular Infrastructure projects in 2017
osmo-bts-virtual for testing without radio hardwareosmo_get_rand_id() function with getrandom() and GnuTLS fallbackA team of Osmocom volunteers has continued the tradition of operating an experimental test network at the annual Chaos Communication Congress 34C3 held in Leipzig (Germany) from December 27 through December 30, 2017.
You can find some more information about this network at the GSM page in the 34C3 wiki and the report by tsaitgaist as part of the 34C3 infrastructure review (from minute 35 onwards of http://live.dus.c3voc.de/relive//34c3/8911/muxed.mp4)
Osmocom thanksThe 2018 incarnation of OsmoDevCon, the annual meeting for Osmocom developers has been scheduled for April 20-23, 2018 and will be held at the usual venue at IN-Berlin in Berlin, Germany.
For more information and Registration as well as submitting your talk proposals, see OsmoDevCon2018 and this mailing list thread
Contrary to OsmoDevCon, the date and venue for the user-oriented OsmoCon is still to be determined. It will be expanded from one to two days. Stay tuned for more news soon.
The Outreachy project has selected work on Debian packaging for Osmocom for the Dec 2017 to Mar 2018 Outreachy Interns
You can read the related announcement at the outreachy announce mailing list
Kira "kobr" Obrezkova will be working on this, with Debian developer Thorsten Alteholz as mentor.
Congratulations, Kira! Thanks to Thorsten Alteholz for mentoring as well as to Outreachy and its sponsors!
In Osmocom, we have made tremendous progress during 2016 and 2017 in re-structuring our code base, with a proper 3GPP AoIP interface between BSC and MSC, the split-up of OsmoNITB, the externalization of the HLR and full 3G integration. This has had lots of fall-out in terms of packaging, and it's important to have the new post-NITB architecture packaged properly in upstream Debian.
Outreachy provides three-month internships for people from groups traditionally underrepresented in tech. Interns are paid a stipend of $5,500 and have a $500 travel stipend available to them. Interns work remotely with mentors from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities on projects ranging from programming, user experience, documentation, illustration and graphical design, to data science.
Heads up all OsmoBSC users: if you are deploying an osmo-bsc from osmo-bsc.git using the latest master branch (or nightly builds), you may notice voice streams not working anymore.
The reason is that OsmoBSC now supports intra-BSC handover (handover between separate BTS connected to the same BSC). To be able to redirect RTP streams between separate BTS, OsmoBSC now always requires an OsmoMGW instance to run alongside it.
Documentation on the Wiki and in the Manuals still needs to be updated, please bear with us until we get a chance to adjust those.
An OsmoMGW config example is
mgcp bind ip 127.0.0.1 bind port 2427 rtp net-range 4002 16000 number endpoints 31 rtp-accept-all 1
If OsmoMGW is running on the same machine as OsmoBSC with MGCP at 127.0.0.1, OsmoBSC needs no further configuration and will find the OsmoMGW by default at 127.0.0.1 port 2427. More detailed OsmoBSC side config can be issued like:
msc mgw remote-ip 127.0.0.1 mgw remote-port 2427 mgw endpoint-range 1 31
You can find OsmoMGW in the nightly (and "latest") builds as well as opkg feeds, it is installed by the osmo-mgw package and developed in the osmo-mgw.git repository.
The OsmoBSC change from which on we require an OsmoMGW is here
Previously, the higher level MGW would directly talk RTP to the BTS, which is now no longer the case. The BSC will always advertise its MGW's RTP ports towards the MSC. This means that the BTS can now be in a network segment that is not reachable by the MSC directly.
Starting today, Osmocom offers an osmocom:latest package feed with Ubuntu + Debian packages of the latest tagged releases of all Osmocom cellular infrastructure software.
Since early 2016, Osmocom has already been offering Nightly_Builds of the master-of-the-day of each individual projects git repository to enable users to utilize Osmocom software without having to build from source. However, by their very nature, nightly builds are volatile as they track each indiviudal development step. This is interesting for users who are testing latest developments or who need to track fixes introduced only very recently.
The new Latest_Builds only change whenever a new release tag is set in the respective source code repository, i.e. every few weeks to months for a given project. While this is not a long-terms supported release, osmocom:latest is a much more suitable choice for deployments.
As part of the NITB-Split and repository reorganisation, we have moved the GPRS code that used to live in openbsc.git to a separate repository.
Technically, the OsmoSGSN, GbProxy and GTPHUB never shared any code with osmo-nitb or the other circuit-switched code in openbsc.git. It was probably a bad idea to start writing the code in the same repository at all.
Some weeks ago, we started a separate osmo-sgsn.git repository for this code, and migrated the build jobs in jenkins as well as for the Nightly_Builds over.
Effective today, the GPRS components have been removed from openbsc.git. Please use osmo-sgsn.git from now on. Sorry for any inconvenience caused.
12 years after OpenGGSN was seemingly abandoned by its original creators, and 7 years after Osmocom adopted it, it is time for a significant change:
OpenGGSN is becoming a first-class Osmocom citizen called OsmoGGSN.
We had already taken some baby-steps in the past by introduction of a CTRL interface as well as the use of libosmocore logging. However, my recent patches introducing a VTY interface and changing the configuration file format from the 'gengetopt' style to libosmovty based change the look+feel of the program significantly that it is a good point to rename.
After all, if command-line arguments and config file syntax are changing, documentation will also need to change and it becomes confusing to users to understand that depending on the version the documentation is correct or incorrect.
So from today on,In terms of maintenance, I don't want to continue to maintain OpenGGSN for much longer. We'll keep it around for some time and merge important security and/or bug fixes, but I won't accept new feature patches into OpenGGSN.
In order to facilitate the simpler use of the multi-voltage USB UART, an Annotated Pinout has been published.
Future PCB versions will have the signal names on the bottom layer silk screen (#2387), I'm sorry for not thinking of this for the first release already.
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