The problem is that my slug is unslung, running busybox for most basic *nix tools and busybox’s touch command doesn’t support the -t option, so I can’t set the modification time on the file to properly queue it.  My half-assed workaround is a shell script (because I couldn’t get the System() command to run the whole string, try as I might) that nohups a background shell process that sleeps for the difference in seconds between now and the wakeup time, then creates the call file.  Not great for far-future scheduling or for large numbers of calls and it won’t survive a reboot, but it’s a start.

My Asterisk diaplan macro passes the target time/date string as the first argument, the target channel as the second, and the ${UNIQUEID} as the third.  One further wrinkle:  busybox 1.3.1, which was what came with the unslung firmware I used, doesn’t have nohup, so it won’t work; busybox 1.10.3 is what ipkg installed into /opt/ and has nohup, but the date command in 1.10.3 didn’t seem to support –date (at all, or maybe just not properly), so nohup is a reference to the 1.10.3 busybox in /opt/bin while /bin/date is a reference to the original 1.3.1 busybox.  Stupid, but it works.

(Oh, and as I told the last person I saw wearing a t-shirt that said “If it’s stupid, but it works, then it isn’t stupid,” there’s definitely such a thing as works-but-stupid–this script hackery is such a thing.  The better solution, space permitting, is probably just to install the coreutils package so as to have proper non-busybox touch and date)

First, the dialplan.

If you’ve got a text-to-speech engine and can create smoother strings of spoken words than what I’ve strung together here, you’re better off (on my Asterisk box, I’m actually using files I made with Cepstral’s Allison-8k running on my Mac).  With my limited command set, there’s no nice way to grab the output of a system command, so I capture it into a temp file, use ReadFile() on the temp file, then delete the temp file.

That dialplan called a shellscript, get_weather.sh:

This uses curl to get the weather from Yahoo, runs it through a complicated sed program which yields two lines of forecast (as &-joined lists of sound files, suitable for running as an argument to Playback() in Asterisk), then joins the two lines with 2 seconds of silence. The “echo -n `…`” is a trick for stripping the trailing newline from the output of curl/sed (a newline inside the Playback() get interpreted as part of the filename, which it isn’t).

Finally, the sed program that processes the output from Yahoo:

The “rearrange” line does most of the work of taking apart the last bits of what Yahoo gave us; the rest of the sed program is dominated by converting months/days/numbers into references to the appropriate Asterisk sound files. [Note: Since I only had today's data with which to work, I made some guesses as to what the shortened forms of most of the months and days would be, as well as how temperatures that weren't two-digit positive numbers would be presented.]

1. Verify that the slug can do Reset Button Upgrade Mode.
2. Get the Unslug firmware.
3. On the admin web page for the slug (default IP is 192.168.1.77), go to Administration > Advanced > Upgrade (default username/password is admin/admin), browse to the unslung firmware, and do the upgrade.  (This step takes a few minutes.)  Wait for the reboot.
4. Verify that the admin web page now shows the unslung firmware version.
5. Do any network config you need (set IP address, etc.)—avoid DHCP as it doesn’t seem to work (the slug does a DHCPDISCOVER, my server(s) do DHCPOFFER, but the exchange goes no further).
6. Enable telnet access (Home > Manage Telnet).  Note that this must be done before any disks are connected.
7. Telnet into the slug (username/password is root/uNSLUng).  Keep this session open through the next steps, so there’s guaranteed root access.
8. Plug the 1GB flash drive into the upper USB port (closer to the ethernet jack).
9. Once the slug recognizes the disk, go to Administration > Advanced > Disk and format the flash drive (Disk 2).  This again takes several minutes (especially with the cheapo slow 1GB flash drives I’m using).  When the page shows “Formatted (EXT3)” for Disk 2, it’s ready for the next step.
10. In the telnet session from step 7, type “unsling disk2″.  Enter a new root password here.
11. Reboot by typing “DO_Reboot” in the telnet session.  The device will beep when it’s fully booted.
12. Go to the admin web page and verify that it says “uNSLUng status:   Unslung to disk2, /dev/sda1″ in the bottom blue bar.
13. Enable telnet again and connect to the device again, verifying that the “NOTE: THIS SYSTEM IS CURRENTLY UNSLUNG” banner shows upon login.
14. Run “touch /.ext3flash” so that (after the next boot) the OS will try not to thrash the flash drive.
15. Verify internet connectivity (e.g. ping google.com).
16. Run “ipkg update” to update the package system.
17. Run “ipkg install openssh” so we can get to the slug without having to enable telnet.
18. Verify that SSH works by logging into the slug over SSH.  Disable telnet.
19. Run “ipkg install openssh-sftp-server” so we can use SFTP to edit files on the slug.
    
20. Set the admin web page password (it is independent of the root password).
    

Other notes:

• The MAC address label on the bottom of the device is the default device name and seems to be “LKG” + the latter half of the MAC address; it seems that the correct MAC address is found by replacing “LKG” with “00:18:39″.

Speaking of OpenBSD boxes, the Alix seems to be much closer to usable than I’d expected now, having restarted from a newer pre-built flashdist image.  The hokey thing I’d forgotten about is how few of the standard basic *nix command programs are in the base flashdist, so I end up copying over program after program from another running OpenBSD box.  I’m hoping to get BIND and dhcpd up and running soon, get pf all set up for router/NAT/firewall use, and try it out with a DSL modem before the weekend is up.

And, with a little luck, by the end of the weekend, all these various devices will be self-updating the various common config files (BIND zones, dhcpd.conf, etc.) from a common server.  I’ve already got a shell script that can check for an update to itself and replace itself with the newer version; I just have to make it check for and retrieve updates for the actual config files.

Since the point where both my parents and I had DSL, I’ve been fiddling with ideas of how to make it easier to share files across our two networks, easier for me to debug issues on their computers, and, well, just more technologically cool.  About a year and a half ago, I replaced the D-Link routers at both sites with a matched pair of used Dell business machines I’d bought on eBay, outfitted with OpenBSD (by far the best OS for trying to run a secure gateway).  This seemed to fit the bill, as it enabled me to more easily connect to my home network from elsewhere without opening up any of my internal machines directly to the outside world, it allowed me to similarly access my parents’ network without exposing any of their internal machines, and (at the peak of its working-ness) we had an encrypted VPN unifying the two sites so I could connect to shared drives on their machines and print to their color laser printer as if all those devices were on my own network.

But somewhere along the way, things started to go south.  A few months ago, the gateway router Dell box on my end died–just wouldn’t power up anymore.  I swapped in an old D-Link hardware router to keep my internet access up and I’ve been working on an Alix unit to replace it, but getting OpenBSD properly tweaked to run off a compact flash card took some time and I still haven’t quite gotten that install happy with PPPoE DSL connections, so it’s still not in place.

Now, making things worse, the machine at my parents’ place isn’t working quite right.  After an extended power failure that wore through the UPS, the machine appears to start up (even sounds right when I stood there and watched it “boot”), but it never shows up on the network, much less makes the DSL connection and joins the network to the DSL.  This led to a similar swap-in of a spare hardware router unit at their place.  Unfortunately, things got messier for them.

These OpenBSD machines I’d been using as routers on both ends had also been running DHCP and DNS for the internal networks and while my internal network had a second OpenBSD box that was able to step in and take over the DNS (it was already serving as a secondary DNS server) and the DHCP (it had been doing DHCP before I got the other machines), my parents’ network had no such machine.  Suddenly, lots of things stopped working correctly.  Printing over the network didn’t work because the IP printing port in Windows was trying to use the (former) FQDN of the printer, or maybe even its old IP address.  This is what got me looking at the slug.