Hello Harald,
On 09-Jan-12 12:26, Harald Welte wrote:
welcome! From my point of view the barrier is not lack of packages or
documentation but more the lack of affordable hardware.
I whole-heartedly agree.
As all probably know, imagine what can happen when you sell on the
street 3000 BTS units?! Operators that replace entire network will sell
everything to poor countries in one package. Not all the people have
enough knowledge to operate RF equipments and bad things can happen.
I guess I said enough here...
Well, we have to be careful here. So far, to the best of my knowledge,
OpenBSC has been tested (and deployed) on x86, x86_64 and ARM, all in
little endian mode.
Running OpenBSC on a big endian platform like SPARC or PPC might run us
into some trouble, especially if the endianness of bit-fields is
different, a lot of our definitions in
libosmocore/include/osmocom/gsm/protocol/ will have to be adapted/fixed.
So I would suggest to at least first verify OpenBSC works for you on
x86/x86_64 or ARM, and then proceed to SPARC32/SPARC64 in a next step.
If you encounter a given bug, you can always test against x86 in order
to see if it is caused by the architecture difference or a general bug.
This is what I was afraid of, that's why I asked first before loosing
time. Thanks for confirming this point.
Also, regarding a web interface: Tens of thousands of network
administrators world wide are able to work with cisco style interfaces
on routers and switches without any problem. Agreed, there is good
documentation available. But I'm really against some kind of web
interface. Operating a GSM network should be done by people who have at
least some level of technical understanding of what they are doing.
I like the CLI but to check the status of an E1 line, change some IP
addresses, check the temperature of TRX modules or other small things I
guess is not a problem and it's not that I cannot type a few commands.
If we appear to make it usable by everone, even people with zero
technical knowledge, we can assume that they will run RF equipment in
configurations which are neither legal nor safe and which will only get
them in trouble eventually.
I agree with you until some point. From what you say this means that
OpenBSC will never be usable because some zero technical can use it to
run RF equipments and who knows what can happen. Am I wrong here?
So yes, there should be better reference documentation and
guides/HOWTOs. But please don't talk about making this software usable
to non-technical people.
If some people will want to run some RF equipments they will do it with
or without help of OpenBSC. All new BSC hardware from X,Y,Z vendors are
running Linux now. If the BSC doesn't look like a normal PC this doesn't
mean anything. They use x86 HW combined with some FPGA and that's all. A
little tweaking and you can run it on low cost hardware.
Another thing, maybe it will be easier for a programmer to run OpenBSC
than a RAN/CN engineer without programming skills. Last part was from a
discussion at work today.
Watching the lists and blogs I know that everybody on this project
worked hard and I am sorry if what I said is wrong.
Best regards,
R.
