Tag Archives: davical

SMStoXMPP

3 Replies

Having moved to AU means that I now have two cell phones – one with my AU SIM card and another with my NZ SIM card which I keep around in order to receive the odd message from friends/contacts back home and far too many calls from telemarketers.

I didn’t want to have to carry around a second mobile and the cost of having a phone on roaming in AU makes it undesirably expensive to keep in touch with anyone via SMS messaging, so went looking for a solution that would let me get my SMS messages from my phone to my laptop and phone in a more accessible form.

I considered purchasing an SMS gateway device, but they tend to be quite expensive and I’d still have to get some system in place for getting messages from the device to me in an accessible form.

Instead I realised that I could use one of the many older Android cellphones that I have lying around as a gateway device with the right software. The ability to run software makes them completely flexible and with WiFi and 3G data options, it would be entirely possible to leave one in NZ and take advantage of the cheaper connectivity costs to send SMS back to people from within the country.

I was able to use an off-the-shelf application “SMS Gateway” to turn the phone into an SMS gateway, with the option of sending/receiving SMS messages via HTTP or SMTP/POP3.

However emails aren’t the best way to send and reply to SMS messages, particularly if your mail client decides to dump in a whole bunch of MIME data. I decided on a more refined approach and ended up writing a program called “SMStoXMPP“.

Like the name suggestions, SMStoXMPP is lightweight PHP-based SMS to XMPP (Jabber) bi-directional gateway application which receives messages from an SMS gateway device/application and relays them to the target user via XMPP instant messages. The user can then reply via XMPP and have the message delivered via the gateway to the original user.

For me this solves a major issue and means I can leave my NZ cell phone at my flat or even potentially back in NZ and get SMS on my laptop or phone via XMPP no matter where I am or what SIM card I’m on.

smstoxmpp_layout

To make conversations even easier, SMStoXMP does lookups of the phone numbers against any CardDAV address book (such as Google Contacts) and displays your chosen name for the contact. It even provides search functions to make it even easier to find someone to chat to.

Chatting with various contacts via SMStoXMPP with Pidgin as a client.

Chatting with various contacts via SMStoXMPP with Pidgin as a client.

I’ve released version 1.0.0 today, along with documentation for installing, configuring gateways and documentation on how to write your own gateways if you wish to add support for other applications.

Generally it’s pretty stable and works well – there are a few enhancements I want to make to the code and a few bits that are a bit messy, but the major requirements of not leaking memory and being reliably able to send and receive messages have been met. :-)

Whilst I’ve only written support for the one Android phone base gateway, I’m working on getting a USB GSM modem to work which would also be a good solution for anyone with a home server.

It would also be trivial to write in support for one of the many online HTTP SMS gateways that exist if you wanted a way to send messages to people and didn’t care about using your existing phone number.

 

DAViCal 1.0.2 on RHEL 5 & 6

8 Replies

To follow up on my previous post about DAViCal, I’ve built and published RPMs for DAViCal itself and the php-awl dependency.

These are based off provided spec files from the project and tweaked somewhat to be more suitable for RHEL 5 & 6.

 

RHEL 5 & PostgreSQL 8.1 Note

Whilst DAViCal is intended (and for normal operation, does) work with PostgreSQL 8.1 or later, this version is too old for the LDAP authentication module to work, as it uses some PostgreSQL 8.4 version queries.

Fortunately RHEL & CentOS ship with both PostgreSQL 8.1 and PostgreSQL 8.4 now available, so you can fix the solution by installing with:

# yum install davical postgresql84-server

 

RHEL 5 & 6 Installation Instructions

These instructions assume you have confirmed the Amberdms RHEL 5 “amberdms-os” repository at minimum – or you can go and pull the specific RPM files you want – php-awl and davical and add them to your own repository.

Once the repositories are setup, simply install with:

# yum install davical

DAViCal uses PostgreSQL, if this is a new/first PostgreSQL installation, you will need to start and possibly initilise the DB:

# service postgresql start
 /var/lib/pgsql/data is missing. Use "service postgresql initdb" to
 initialize the cluster first.     [FAILED]
# service postgresql initdb
 Initializing database:    [  OK  ]
# service postgresql start
 Starting postgresql service:     [  OK  ]

We need to edit the PostgreSQL user authentication configuration to allow local-only password-less access for the DAViCal application. Optionally you can configure MD5, ident or other desired methods. Add the two lines below to the configuration file, above any existing lines.

# vi /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf

 # trust davical
 local   davical davical_app     trust
 local   davical davical_dba     trust

Restart PostgreSQL for the changes to take effect:

# service postgresql restart

Install the database:

# cd /tmp/
# su postgres -c /usr/share/davical/dba/create-database.sh

 Supported locales updated.
 Updated view: dav_principal.sql applied.
 CalDAV functions updated.
 RRULE functions updated.
 Database permissions updated.
 NOTE
 ====
 *  The password for the 'admin' user has been set to 'EXAMPLE' 

 Thanks for trying DAViCal!  Check in /usr/share/doc/davical/examples/ for
 some configuration examples.  For help, visit #davical on irc.oftc.net.

Adjust the access rules for Apache & restart it:

# vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/davical.conf
# service httpd restart

Test access at http://localhost/davical/or whatever your appropriate server URL is. Any 403 errors probably suggest fault with the /etc/httpd/conf.d/davical.conf IP ACL configuration.

 

RHEL 5 & 6 Upgrade Instructions

Using the packages I have provided, the DAViCal PostgreSQL DB will be updated on any new releases when installing newer RPMs.

This uses the /usr/share/davical/dba/update-davical-database script supplied with DAViCal and shouldn’t require any manual execution or options normally.

 

LDAP Authentication

To configure LDAP authentication, edit the configuration file and define the external authentication settings.

vi /etc/davical/config.php

See the notes in the file about LDAP configuration or consult the quite reliable source of documentation at the DAViCal wiki.

You will also need to have php-ldap installed – it’s not one of the default package dependencies – if it’s missing, you will get this clear message on the login screen:

"drivers_ldap : function ldap_connect not defined, check your php_ldap module"

To install, run:

# yum install php-ldap
# service httpd restart

If authentication still fails to work, try the following

  1. Check the version of PostgreSQL used – must be 8.4 or later, not 8.1, as per my note at the start of this document.
  2. Check Apache error logs (typically /var/log/httpd/error_log)
  3. Check the LDAP server logs

 

 

 

DAViCal, awkward name, great features

5 Replies

A reoccurring theme of this blog is that I love to be able to use open standards and open source for storing and accessing my information – biggest example is of course IMAP for email, but I also use tools such as Mozilla Sync Server for self-reliant synchronization and backup of client device information, without using external cloud providers.

I’ve been a user of Evolution for almost a decade now – sometimes criticized as the “Outlook of Linux”, Evolution provides mail, calendering, contacts and todo lists to the GNOME desktop, with a pretty large but sometimes slightly buggy feature set. For me personally, it’s always done a great job and it’s my key business productivity tool.

I moved all my mail onto an IMAP server years ago, which makes it easy to shift clients if I ever need to – in my case, pretty much just needing to access mail from both my laptop and smart phone.

However this hasn’t been the case for other key data such as calendering and contacts. A few years ago, the open source calendering solutions available weren’t that well developed, and many clients suffered limitations such as read-only functionality.

Thankfully this has been changing – most clients (*glares angrily at Microsoft Outlook*) now support CalDAV and CardDAV quite reliably, which gives us an open standard that works across different programs, platforms and device types.

  • CalDAV is an open standard for the exchange of calendering and task/todo/memo information between a client and a server.
  • CardDAV is an open standard for the exchange of contact/address book information between a client and a server.

These two standards have a number of implementations, both open source and proprietary, of note is Apple Calender Server, which is Apple’s open source implementation; and DAViCal, an open source LAMP based server solution that is becoming quite popular.

I’ve used both solutions – my employer runs an Apple Calender Server after getting fed up at not having free/busy between engineers. Whilst we ended up running a MacOS server, the Linux ports have improved and there are resources for setting it up on a Linux or even BSD host.

Apple Calender Server works reasonably well with Evolution, I never have any issue booking events, however Evolution appears unable to accept or deny meeting requests, forcing me to go to the calender server web-interface which is actually pretty horrific.

I decided I wouldn’t use it for my own personal calendering, even if I went to the effort for porting it onto my Linux servers, it wouldn’t really be the solution I ideally want as it lacks a lot of features and isn’t as easy to configure as other Linux services.

Instead I had a look at DAViCal. It’s a feature-packed calendering and contacts application developed primarily by Morphoss in Wellington NZ, started by Andrew McMillian of ex-Catalyst IT fame.

Despite having an annoyingly tricky name to type (you try typing it for the 100th time at 3am without typoing on the capitalization!!), the software itself appears reliable and worked across a number of devices when I ran tests.

It’s not perfect, I have some issues with the user interface design, which very functional and effective, it’s not that intuitive to a new user, exposing far too many options to them at the beginning, ideally have a simple/advanced option so a user who just wants to add user calenders and do basic stuff can do so, then dig into more detailed ACLs, tokens, shared calenders, etc as needed.

Naturally it’s open source, so I should stop complaining and hack up some code to demonstrate what I think might be better. Maybe if people would stop stealing my car I’d have time to get something done. :-/

Main Screen Turn On! (Maybe some more 1-2-3 clear setup flows here would be nice, the wall of text is kind of offputting for visual people like myself).

Options! All the options!

The web-based interface is only for administration, there isn’t a web-based calender app provided with DAViCal, instead choose any CalDAV client you wish to use with it, whether it’s web based or client-side.

I haven’t given DAViCal’s feature set a full work out yet, at this stage I’ve just setup my personal calendar, contacts and todo list on both Evolution and my Android ICS phone but haven’t touched meeting requests, shared calenders and free/busy information.

Partly my testing is a bit limited since I’m only running Evolution 2.30.3 (Debian Stable) which is a little outdated and it looks like there’s some functionality missing/broken that might not be an issue any more.

On the mobile side, I’m using “aCal”, an open source Android application written by the DAViCal developer, providing a CalDAV calender, todo list and read-only contact/address book synchronization.

This now means I can add, edit and delete calender and task entries on either my Android phone or Linux laptop via evolution and have it propagate to the other device – although unfortunately this is based on polling, rather than push (looks like push is possible theoretically via an extension to the standard, works with iCal).

Tasks & calendar entries in a bright sunny UI

I can also get read-only copies of all my contact information from Evolution synced through to my phone, but sadly there isn’t support for editing contacts on the Android phone just yet.

I did also consider using LDAP for my address book entries, but CardDAV looks like a better designed solution, it’s very rare that I don’t see “LDAP” and “headache” mentioned in the same sentence, and this comes from someone maintaining and supporting LDAP enterprise environments…

Essentially the main problem with LDAP, is that there isn’t an exact standard for address entries, so what works for one client, might not work 100% for another, along with limited selection of decent applications for actually managing LDAP address databases.

Also some clients treat LDAP assuming it’s going to be a million+ record store and expose different UI compared to that of smaller address books which harm user experience (*glares at Evolution*).

aCal & Android ICS address book integration - note the uneditable edit screen on the right, read-only for now :-(

The other main issue with aCal is that it doesn’t sync with the native OS calender program, but instead provides it’s own. Digging through the documentation and mailing list, this appears to be due to the native application lacking support for some of the functionality needed for a proper CalDAV implementation, so a sync solution would leave certain features missing, although I’d still like the option.

Of course these are limitations of aCal, not DAViCal or the standards themselves – there are some other CalDav & CardDAV sync programs available in the Android market under non-open licenses, which you have the option of trying.

The nice thing about using standards is that you can have multiple vendors competing to make the best product/tool for their customer’s needs, not simply using lock-in to maintain/force a customer base. :-)

Overall DAViCal seems really nice and in my testing has been quite reliable – I’m now moving on to more rigorous testing and am in the process of migrating my calender and contacts information into it, once I start using it daily in the real world the true testing begins.

Keen to take a look at what options I have around exposing some information publicly, eg sharing schedule free/busy with friends on different servers.