news

mms client

<MMS Client>
29-04-2003

This is the first release of the MMS Client.
It is an alpha release because large parts of the functionality
are still untested.

What has been tested is receiving SMS Messages and receiving
MMS messages using HTTP over an ethernet connection.

I have currently no plans to take this any further. The good
folk at www.kannel.org might include it in their suite.

The following are the notest about this release:

Features:

1.	Receive SMS messages and store them in XML format - TESTED
2.	Notification of new SMS message by appending the name of the 
    file containing the new SMS message to a well known file - TESTED
3.	Notification of new SMS message by calling a URL on which an 
    interested piece of software is listening - UNTESTED
4.	Receive notification of a waiting MMS message, retrieve it 
    using HTTP and store it in XML format - TESTED
5.	Receive notification of a waiting MMS message, retrieve 
    it using WAP/WSP and store it in XML format - UNTESTED
6.	Notification of new MMS message by appending the name of the 
    file containing the new MMS message to a well known file - TESTED
7.	Notification of new MMS message by calling a URL on which an 
    interested piece of software is listening - UNTESTED
8.	Use a dial-up connection instead of a Ethernet connection 
    to download new MMS messages - UNTESTED
9.	The modem cannot be used simultaneously for listening for new 
    SMS messages and downloading MMS messages. The client has the 
    logic to swap between these 2 modes - UNTESTED
10.	Sending SMS messages from the client using an HTTP interface - UNTESTED
11.	Sending MMS messages from the client using an HTTP interface - UNTESTED

It's safe to say that anything in the above list that is marked UNTESTED 
currently doesn't work and will need time to test and debug.

Implementation issues

The current client is usable for a demo and possibly a trial but would 
need the following issues looked at if it were to be industrial strength:
1.	The client software does not shutdown cleanly
2.	Memory leakage
3.	Too many threads: the number of threads should be reduced
4.	General trimming down: cutting out all the pieces of software 
    from the original Kannel suite that is not needed anymore.

Miscellaneous
There are some GSM modems that allow simultaneous access to its SMS and 
GPRS facilities but there is no Linux support for that feature.



<Kannel>

NEWS about Kannel: Open Source WAP and SMS Gateway version 1.3.1

This is a DEVELOPMENT version. It should be usable for experimentation
and testing, and is a release candidate for the 1.3 branch. Please do 
try it out and report problems to [e-mail] (the development 
mailing list). The bug tracking system is currently offline.


Changes since version 1.3.0:

Compatibility breakers:

  * SMPP changed default behaviour of the 'source-addr-autodetect' to yes.
    Now the module will try to set TON and NPI automatically by scanning the
    given source adddress.

  * Added proxying of the smsc-id value to attached smsbox instances via 
    the HTTP SMSC module. This allows spreading load from one smsbox
    to several bearerbox instances.

New features:

  * Additional debian packaging files.

  * Documentation section about log file rotation.

  * PPG now allows routing to explicite smsc-id's. New config directives
    'default-smsc' for ppg group and 'forced-smsc' and 'default-smsc' for
    wap-push-user group have been added.

  * Added debug info about ammount of outstanding HTTP reqeusts in 
    the smsbox retry queue.

  * OIS added direct module.
  
  * CIMD2 added validity setting.

Bugfixes:

  * CIMD2 various fixes for correct urltrans()ing.

  * AT2 fixed double-increment bug for outgoing messages counter.

  * Fixed a keep-alive lookup problem when using a HTTP proxy.

  * HTTP SMSC various fixes.

  * Fixed infinite loop bug if /TYPE=xxx is missing in the PAP document.

  * Fixed a bug in the smsbox routing behaviour of bearerbox. 

  * SMPP various fixes for the optional fields decoding.

  * EMI2 fixed MO counter bug and assignmend of non-existing fields bug.

  * Various fixes in the WAP application layer.


Changes since version 1.2.1:

Compatibility breakers:

  * Added initial SMPP v3.4 optional fields support. Still very experimental.
    Use the 'interface-version = 33' config directive if you don't want to
    relly on this new code.

  * HTTP servers can bind to specific interfaces now.

  * WTP timer frequence can be set now manually with 'timer-freq' value.

  * EMI2 handling of un-acked msg can be configured via 'wait-ack-expire'
    directive. See User Guide for more details.

New features:

  * WTP-SAR (segmentation and re-assembly) is now available for the 
    WAP gateway part. This enables Kannel to function as MMS proxy.
    This has been tested with several new MMS capable phones.

  * smsbox inbound routing has been added. It allows routing based upon 
    smsc-id or receiver number rules to specific smsbox instances. This may 
    be several real smsboxes or even own boxes that act to bearerbox as if 
    they are smsboxes by using the same message communication interface. This 
    is usefull for implementing own boxes that act as EMI/UCP or SMPP proxies.

  * iconv support has been added for character encoding. Adds 'alt-charset' 
    directive for the SMPP smsc group. Use iconv's type representation to 
    define which charset is used by a specific smsc.

  * HTTP connections are now established in non-blocking mode.

  * Added speed 115200 for AT2 connections if system supports.

  * Protection against malformed PDUs for AT2 has been increased.

  * Added detection of invalid TP-OA address length and logging for AT2.

  * Added National Replacement Codes (NCR) ISO 21 German for german umlauts 
    to be used with 'alt-charset' directive.

  * Added Siemens SL45 init strings for AT2.

  * Added a WAP packet proxy application, test/wapproxy.c. This may be used
    to act as a WDP, WTP proxy between WAP client and WAP gateway for 
    packet analyzation purposes.

  * Allows returning to the 'device-home' URL if 'smart-errors' are activated.
    This can be used to let the phone go back to a pre-defined URL in case an
    serious error happens, i.e. HTTP lookup of an URI fails.
  
Bugfixes:

  * SMPP thread handling bug fixed.

  * AT2 date encoding bug fixed.

  * HTTP basic auth userid and password handling bug fixed. 

  * Fixed WAP smart-error message bug, when HTTP lookup failed.

  * AT2 init string in Siemens TC35 configuration fixed.

  * Fixed various SSL connection related bugs.

  * DLR race condition due to unlocked list fixed.

  * Fixed memory leak in smsc abstraction layer for restarting smscs.

  * Fixed initial approach for client SDU size to solve the problem with 
    concatenated WSP requests.

  * SMPP throttling problem fixed.

  * Fixed HTTP queueing bug.

  * Various improvements and fixes in the HTTP routine library.

  * Fixed panics for /store-status calls if no store-file is used.
  
  * Fixed difftime calculation to make heartbeat work again.

  * Fixed possible race condition in store file saving.

Development news:

  * We need to think about and rewrite the iconv() character encoding layer.
    The character encoding should be done in the smsc module abstracted
    layer and not in the smsc specific module layer. As a base encoding we
    are going to use latin1.
         

Changes since version 1.2.0:

Compatibility breakers:

  * SMPP module users should note that the 'msg-id-type' default behaviour
    has changed. The SMPP spec says that msg ids should be C strings and
    hence we treat them as such per default. If your SMSC gives msg ids
    in submit_sm and deliver_dm PDUs in different numbering basing, then
    please use the 'msg-id-type' config directive to set it accordingly.

New features:

  * SMPP priority flag is now supported.

  * SMPP unbind PDU handling added.

  * SMPP throttling error code support added.

  * MacOS X support has been improved.

  * Added 'allowed-receiver-prefix' and 'denied-receiver-prefix' for 
    sms-service groups. This is used to restrict access to service requests 
    coming in on certain receiver numbers, i.e. shortcut numbers.
  
  * Added directives 'http-request-retry' and 'http-queue-delay' for HTTP
    request queueing for sms-service 'get-url' and 'post-url' services.
    This way a non reachable HTTP server will not cause to drop the request.
    Instead smsbox will hold a queue and retry the HTTP request via the 
    configurable settings 'http-request-retry' and 'http-queue-delay'.

  * Added 'store-status' HTTP admin command to retrieve the messages 
    currently in the main queue.

  * Added a '--with-cflags=CFLAGS' and '--with-libs=LIBS' configuration
    options. These are usefull when Kannel is linked again additional
    proprietary modules.

  * Improvements in the Siemens M20 GSM modem support.
 
  * Added EMI2 specific configuration directives 'notification-pid' and 
    'notification-addr'. 

  * Added Return Path Indicator (RPI) support for SMPP and EMI2 via boolean 
    sendsms interface parameter 'rpi'

  * LibSDB support for external storage has been added. libSDB is an abstraction
    library for various DB system, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, gdbm 
    and some others.

  * wapbox has an own access.log facility now.

  * Added the new 'smasi' SMSC type for connecting to SM/ASI protocoll SMSC, 
    like the CriticalPath InVoke SMS Center.

  * Added HEAD method support for HTTP client module.

  * DLR support for the AT2 module has been added.

  * Slight re-organization of the DLR module to make it easier in supporting 
    other SMSC modules too.

  * Added 'unified-prefix' configuration directive on a smsc basis to set 
    number normalization rules. This may be used it SMSC connections handle 
    prefix normalization differently.

  * Added 'source-addr-autodetect' to smsc group for auto-detecting source 
    addr in smpp module, if desired.
  
Bugfixes:

  * Timezone issue fixed in SMPP module.
 
  * Output of fakewap has been made more human-readable.

  * Various fixes and improments in the wmlscript parsing routines.

  * Fixed various other possible segmentation faulting bugs in handling
    null'ed Octstr vars.

  * Fixed various mutex problems that caused errors while accessing lists.

  * Some fixes in HTTP keep-alive handling logic that causes our client to 
    keep the connection up, even while the server has asked to drop it.

  * Various fixes and improvements in the PPG (push proxy gateway) module.

  * Fixed a bug in the prefix-match routine that caused to tread an number
    match not to be a prefix match.


Changes since version 1.1.6:

Compatibility breakers:

 * configure now uses the --enable-localtime as default. This will log
   file stamps in local time, not GMT. Beware if you need other timezone 
   date logging to switch this off.

 * configure now uses the --with-malloc=native as default. This is more
   suitable for production environments then the limited malloc checking
   counterpart.

 * Use the 'to' HTTP GET variable to specify the destination MSISDN of 
   outbound messages for both sendsms and sendota HTTP interfaces.

 * wapbox does not any longer start a PPG HTTP server thread if no ppg
   group is specified in the configuration file.

New features:

 * Harmonized logging output for EMI2 and SMPP module.