demo page for SMS Gateway

Secure access with SMS

Paid downloads with SMS

Mobile services

Components, architecture and configuration

Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 3 (Taroon Update 9)
Linux oracle.2question.com 2.4.21-50.EL #1 Tue May 8 17:26:44 EDT 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux

• gnokii
  • Gnokii is the name of a project that aims to develop tools and drivers for Nokia mobile phones. These tools include modem drivers, console tools, GUI applications etc. All software that forms part of the project is released under the GNU General Public License. Please see the COPYING file for more details on license/copying issues, the lack of warranty and where to send a postcard if you like gnokii :-) Gnokii is designed to work on a variety of operating systems (Linux, FreeBSD, etc.) and hardware platforms (PPC, Intel, etc.)
• kannel
  • Kannel is an open source WAP gateway. It attempts to provide this essential part of the WAP infrastructure freely to everyone so that the market potential for WAP services, both from wireless operators and specialized service providers, will be realized as efficiently as possible.
    Kannel also works as an SMS gateway for GSM networks. Almost all GSM phones can send and receive SMS messages, so this is a way to serve many more clients than just those using a new WAP phone.
• playsms
  • PlaySMS is a full-featured SMS gateway application that features sending of single or broadcast SMS messages, the ability to receive and forward SMSes, an SMS polling system, and SMS commands for saving/retrieving information to/from a server and executing server side shell scripts
• mySQL (version 4.0.18)
  • This doesn't come with Redhat EL 3.0. You have to install it yourself
  • The MySQL database server is the world's most popular open source database. With more than five million active installations, MySQL has quickly become the core of many high-volume, business-critical applications.
    Customers such as Yahoo!, Google, Cisco, Sabre Holdings, HP and NASA are realizing significant cost savings by using MySQL's high performance, reliable database management software to power large Web sites, business-critical enterprise applications and packaged software applications.
• imap
  • This doesn't come with Redhat EL 3.0. You have to install it yourself
  • IMAP stands for Internet Message Access Protocol. It is a method of accessing electronic mail or bulletin board messages that are kept on a (possibly shared) mail server. In other words, it permits a "client" email program to access remote message stores as if they were local. For example, email stored on an IMAP server can be manipulated from a desktop computer at home, a workstation at the office, and a notebook computer while traveling, without the need to transfer messages or files back and forth between these computers.
• unixODBC
  • This doesn't come with Redhat EL 3.0. You have to install it yourself.
  • The unixODBC Project goals are to develop and promote unixODBC to be the definitive standard for ODBC on non MS Windows platforms. This is to include GUI support for both KDE and GNOME.
• php (version 4.3.5)
  • This version doesn't come with Redhat EL 3.0. Better to install latest version and recompile it with mysql, imap, unixodbc and use these configure commenads
  • PHP is a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development and can be embedded into HTML.

Starting the gateway
After you have compiled Kannel and edited configuration file for your taste, you can either run Kannel from command line or use supplied start-stop-daemon and run_kannel_box programs to use it as a daemon service (more documentation about that later).

If you cannot or do not know how to set up daemon systems or just want to test Kannel, you probably want to start it from command line. This means that you probably want to have one terminal window for each box you want to start (xterm or screen will do fine). To start the bearerbox, give the following command: 

./bearerbox -v 1 [conffile]
$ nohup bearerbox ~theo/software/linux/gateway-1.2.1/gw/smskannel.conf &
The -v 1 sets the logging level to INFO. This way, you won't see a large amount of debugging output (the default is DEBUG). Full explanation of Kannel command line arguments is below.

[conffile] is the name of the configuration file you are using with Kannel. The basic distribution packet comes with two sample configuration files, smskannel.conf and wapkannel.conf (in gw subdirectory), of which the first one is for testing out SMS Kannel and the second one for setting up a WAP Kannel. Feel free to edit those configuration files to set up your own specialized system.

After the bearer box, you can start the WAP box: 

./wapbox -v 1 [conffile]
or the SMS box: 
./smsbox -v 1 [conffile]
$ nohup smsbox ~theo/software/linux/gateway-1.2.1/gw/smskannel.conf &
or both, of course. The order does not matter, except that you need to start the bearer box before the other boxes. Without the bearer box, the other boxes won't even start.