[Edbrowse-dev] texting and wifi

[Edbrowse-dev] texting and wifi

[Karl Dahlke]

Always looking for easy command line ways to do things.

My three kids are often not near their computers,
but I like to stay in touch with them in real time,
and texting is the perfect way to do that.
We happen to be on sprint, which works really well.
If my daughters number is 5551111,
then I text her by sending email to

2485551111@messaging.sprintpcs.com

Because of the way edbrowse works, every mail out has to have a subject,
I just use a letter or short word.
Then the body of the message, which is my text,
but it is cut off at 120 characters, so be brief.
Use sm- to supress the .signature file.
It would probably be cut off anyways.

When she replies it could come from the same address,
or sometimes from this address if she has a smart phone.

2485551111@pm.sprint.com

So these are good lines to have in your address book.

#  text to my daughter Beth and get replies therefrom
btxt:2485551111@messaging.sprintpcs.com
-bpm:2485551111@pm.sprint.com

I believe at&t has a similarly easy texting interface.

If all you have is a cell number and don't know the carrier
you might start here.
http://www.txtdrop.com
It's an easy edbrowse friendly site.
If that works and they reply then you've got a handle on it.

---------------------------------------------

wifi can be seriously annoying, because all the setup procedures are graphical.
Select the ssid from dropdown list, set up passwords from a screen,
it's nasty!
I spent two months finding a solution, and I have sort of put all my eggs
in that basket.
It's a little usb wifi stick, no larger than a cigarette lighter.
tenda 3070
I have about 4 of them, and I can pop them onto any computer or laptop.
I don't care what wifi device might be built into the machine; I don't use it.
I don't build the linux modules for them either, only rt3070.ko.
That driver comes standard with linux, but oops, it doesn't support
any of the command line features that I want.
In other words, you can't set wep or wpa passwords with command line tools.
Jesus!
I got the source, and made a few changes,
and it has worked for me since the 2.6 kernels, and through 3.12.
http://www.eklhad.net/rt3070.zip
If you have kernel sources then you can just type make to get rt3070sta.ko
Install this module and plug in the usb wifi and you have the interface ra0.
Run ifconfig or iwconfig and see.

Then I have little scripts for the wifi channels I typically connect to.
Here is the one for my home wifi,
though I am typically connected by wire cause it's more reliable.

iwconfig $1 nick my-machine mode managed
iwpriv $1 set NetworkType=Infra
iwpriv $1 set AuthMode=WPA2PSK
iwpriv $1 set EncrypType=AES
iwpriv $1 set WPAPSK=hex-encoded-password
iwpriv $1 set SSID="my home ssid"

use wpa_passphrase to build the encoded password.

Then wifi-current is just a link to wifi-home or whatever I am using.
Then /sbin/ifup-local calls wifi-current on ra0.
Course this part may be fedora specific.
With all that in place, connect to wifi like this.

ifup ra0

And yet one time in five it does not work, don't know why.
I just wait 30 seconds
ifdown ra0
wait 30 seconds
ifup ra0
And then it usually works.
Once connected you're good.

In a hotel etc with my laptop I can usually bring up ra0 any old way,
it won't connect,
but then iwlist shows me what is there, all in command mode,
and if one of them is public then I can tweak a public wifi script
and connect using that.
I'm on the air through the public wifi.


Karl Dahlke