chan_ss7, pcap files and 64bit machines

UPDATE: April 29th 2008

Anders Baekgaard of Dicea ApS (current chan_ss7 maintainers) recommends the following alternative patch. Please note that mtp3d.c will also need to be patched in the same way:

--- chan_ss7.c~ 2008-04-03 09:23:56.000000000 +0200
+++ chan_ss7.c  2008-04-29 08:29:20.000000000 +0200
@@ -249,11 +249,12 @@

 static void dump_pcap(FILE *f, struct mtp_event *event)
 {
+  unsigned int sec  = event->dump.stamp.tv_sec;
   unsigned int usec  = event->dump.stamp.tv_usec - 
     (event->dump.stamp.tv_usec % 1000) +
     event->dump.slinkno*2 + /* encode link number in usecs */
     event->dump.out /* encode direction in/out */;

-  fwrite(&event->dump.stamp.tv_sec, sizeof(event->dump.stamp.tv_sec), 1, f);
+  fwrite(&sec, sizeof(sec), 1, f);
   fwrite(&usec, sizeof(usec), 1, f);
   fwrite(&event->len, sizeof(event->len), 1, f); /* number of bytes of packet in file */
   fwrite(&event->len, sizeof(event->len), 1, f); /* actual length of packet */

END UPDATE: April 29th 2008

A quickie for the Google trolls:

While trying to debug some SS7 Nature of Address (NAI) indication issues, I needed to use chan_ss7’s ‘dump’ feature from the Asterisk CLI. It worked fine but the resultant pcap files always failed with messages like:

# tshark -r /tmp/now
tshark: "/tmp/now" appears to be damaged or corrupt.
(pcap: File has 409000-byte packet, bigger than maximum of 65535)

After much digging about and head-against-wall banging, I discovered the issue
is with the packet header in the pcap file. It’s defined by its spec to be:

typedef struct pcaprec_hdr_s {
        guint32 ts_sec;         /* timestamp seconds */
        guint32 ts_usec;        /* timestamp microseconds */
        guint32 incl_len;       /* number of octets of packet saved in file */
        guint32 orig_len;       /* actual length of packet */
} pcaprec_hdr_t;

chan_ss7 uses the timeval struct defined by system headers to represent ts_sec and ts_usec. But, on 64bit machines (certainly mine), these values are defined as unsigned long rather than unsigned int (presumably as a step to get over the ‘year 2038 bug’). Hence the packet header is all wrong.

An easy solution is the following patch in mtp.h:

77a78,90
> /*
>  * The packet header in the pcap file (used for the CLI command 'dump') is 
defined so has to
>  * have the two time components as unsigned ints. However, on 64bit 
machines, the system
>  * timeval struct may use unsigned long. As such, we use a custom version 
here:
>  */
> struct _32bit_timeval
> {
>   unsigned int tv_sec;            /* Seconds.  */
>   unsigned int tv_usec;      /* Microseconds.  */
> };
>
>
>
125c138
<       struct timeval stamp;        /* Timestamp */
---
>       struct _32bit_timeval stamp;        /* Timestamp */

There may be a better way – but this works.

This relates to chan_ss7-1.0.0 from http://www.dicea.dk/company/downloads and I have let them know also. It’s also a known issue for the Wireshark developers (although I did not investigate in detail to see what their resolution was for the future). See the following thread from 1999:

Amazon AWS Keeps Getting Better

Amazon’s Web Services have just launched a health dashboard which should prove very useful and can be found at http://status.aws.amazon.com.

They’ve also announced paid support services.

An eagerly awaited feature for me is persistent EC2 storage which they are trialling right now and hopefully I’ll get into the beta program. Fingers crossed!