Happy Holidays

...and Season's Greetings, visitors! I'm pleased to say I may soon be receiving the only xmas gift I really desire, which is to be among the employed again by next year. I recently applied for a sysadmin gig in a really cool-looking environment (academic publisher... perhaps more details later), and was offered the position soon afterwards. We're now in the salary negotiation part of the process, so I'm eager to hear their next offer. Anyway, wish me luck...

Today I think I solved a very annoying problem I've been having for the last few weeks (in WinXP/SP2). I've been experiencing very erratic web and email access, which oddly enough, has not effected other services such as Trillian (more or less eliminating the possibility of any provider issues). So, since restarting the LAN interface ceased to help anymore, I tried shutting down the firewall, Zone Alarm (Free) 6.5.737.000. Bingo. Somehow, my favorite Windows firewall has become buggy and defective, and I'm not sure if it's something specific to me or a widespread problem... so, moving on. I started looking around, and found another freebie called Comodo which looks pretty good. So far, everything works well; I'll need to use it a few months before I can give it the morphball seal of approval though.

Among other goings-on, I'm still continuing to have a blast with my recently-resurrected laptop. For Channukah this year, my extremely cool mother-in-law (an old-school IBM/Lucent/Ma Bell techie) gave me some new adapters and hubs to play with. One of which gives my aging Dell Inspiron 2100 Bluetooth capabilities (Airnet USB Bluetooth adapter), in order to interface with the OnCourse SiRF star III Bluetooth GPS Receiver I got last Fall.

So, using BackTrack's nice array of tools (hciconfig and hcitool for Bluetooth, and rfcomm and GPSD for GPS), and of course utilizing the excellent community support, I was able to get this working pretty quickly. (Updated 05/22/2007 for BT2 here)

I won't go into specifics regarding how the commands work (there's already great info out there already), but I wrote a small shell script for first bringing up a USB Bluetooth adapter, then connecting to a devices' hardware address, and binding it to the rfcomm (GPSD daemon can communicate with. (The only first-time step you may have to take is setting up your /etc/bluetooth/rfcomm.conf file; I found this link invaluable in this endeavor, or just see below.)

#!/bin/bash
# start-oncourse

echo "Starting Bluetooth..."
hciconfig hci0 up

# scan to recognize GPS device's hwaddr
hcitool scan

# insert your own hwaddr below
echo "Connecting to OnCourse GPS..."
hcitool cc 00:0D:B5:43:72:5A

# show connected
hcitool con

echo "Binding to rfcomm0..."
rfcomm bind rfcomm0

# enter port: /dev/rfcomm0 and preferred baud rate
echo "Starting GPSD..."
start-gps-daemon

echo "Done."

...and another script for shutting things down:

#!/bin/bash
# stop-oncourse

echo "Stopping GPSD..."
stop-gps-daemon

echo "Releasing rfcomm0..."
rfcomm release rfcomm0

echo "Disconnecting from OnCourse GPS..."
hcitool dc 00:0D:B5:43:72:5A

echo "Stopping Bluetooth..."
hciconfig hci0 down

echo "Done."

So, simply copy/paste these into your /usr/local/bin and chmod 755 (or 700 if you're in the nasty habit of logging in as root...); remember to replace your GPS device's hwaddr with your own, which can be acquired with an "hcitool scan".

Edit 12/28: I've noticed the Bluetooth resource I cited has been down for a little while, so here is my rfcomm.conf file (basically make sure bind = yes, and that your proper hwaddr is inserted):

rfcomm0 {
bind yes;
device 00:0D:B5:43:72:5A;
channel 1;
comment "OnCourse Bluetooth GPS"
}

If no error messages displayed, and GPSD confirmed it's running on port 2947, you should be good to go. To test communication, try running "xgps". If there's nothing happening, try "telnet localhost 2947" and type "r" to see if there is any GPS output scrolling down your terminal (hit "ctrl+]" to stop, "q" to quit). If you connected to the port fine, but there's no output, type "rfcomm" to ensure there is a device bound. Double check rfcomm.conf is configured correctly, and try to bind again with "rfcomm bind rfcomm0". Once you have this working, you should have a nice range of GPS-aware apps like Kismet and GpsDrive (or both in conjunction) to experiment with. Have fun!