Bitswitcher Call Monitor

bscallmon is a small gui tool that allows you to view the list of incoming and outgoing phone calls on routers running the BitSwitcher firmware without having to log into the router's web interface.

Features

• Downloads and displays the lists of incoming and outgoing calls.
• Call lists are stored locally, so the list size is unlimited, whereas the router's internal list size is limited to 20 calls.
• Phone book and custom icons per number.
• Optionally the application can be minimized into the system tray (X11 and windows only).
• Optionally a notification balloon can be shown when incoming calls arrive (X11 and windows only).
• Platform independent - runs on unix and windows systems.

System requirements

• Python and Tkinter 2.4 or higher.
• Tcl / Tk 8.4 or higher.
• Tktreectrl 2.1 or higher.
• For tray icon support you will also need TkTray on X11 or WinIco on windows systems.
• A working ssh client; on unix systems ssh should be installed by default. For windows systems I recommend Cygwin which is free and easy to install.

Installation

No installation necessary. Simply unpack the 7z archive and run bscallmon.py .

Configuration

Configuration is done directly from bscallmon.py, just open the file with a decent text editor and have a look at the configuration section at the top of the file; I hope everything is self-explanatory.
On multi-user systems the best bet is to copy the complete bscallmon folder into any user's home directory and run bscallmon.py from there.

Windows users who want to get rid of the ugly console window need to rename bscallmon.py into bscallmon.pyw .

Bugs

bscallmon does nothing to help you set up the passwordless login to your router, so before you run the program for the first time, it is a good idea to verify that the passwordless login actually works. The command bscallmon uses to retrieve the call lists is:

    # ssh -o ConnectTimeout=10 -l root -i IDFILE /bin/bcm_helper -c 1

where IDFILE is of course the file containing your private dsa key.
In order to setup passwordless ssh login, you typically need to create your dsa key pair with

    # ssh-keygen -t dsa

and then copy the contents of the public key file into the "authorized keys" field on the SSH page of BitSwitcher's web interface.

Other known issues:

• A few oddities with BitSwitcher are not handled gracefully:
  • In some cases the ssh login fails (although the internet connection through the router works without problems), it was not even timed out. In this case the gui will hang with a "watch" mouse pointer until it is killed. This happened sometimes after the computer was rebooted, I was not able to reliably reproduce this behavior, though.
  • Sometimes when a incoming phone call is not answerded, the router seems to fail to send a disconnect event after the caller hung up (or maybe bscallmon fails to detect it?), which causes the notification balloon to remain on the screen, until bscallmon closes it after 30 sec.
  • When clearing the call list, all entries are removed from the local log file and from the router's internal list, however when a new call arrives, the router will restore the previously deleted calls. There is no way to permanently delete the router's internal list but to reboot the router, which will delete the call list in any case.
• There is no way to determine the tray icon's screen position with winico, so on windows systems the screen coordinates for the notification balloon must be given exdplicitely in the configuration section, otherwise it will always be displayed in the bottom-right corner, possibly underneath the taskbar.

In case you encounter problems, do not hesitate to contact me:
Michael Lange <klappnase (at) freakmail (dot) de>

News

Dec. 15 2010: bscallmon-0.1

Initial release.

License

bscallmon is licensed under the terms of the Gnu General Public License.

Download

bscallmon-0.1.7z (53 kB)