tricks – eBlog

Yaesu FTM-400XDR and Chirp

Emre — Sun, 18 Dec 2016 21:10:02 +0000

I use Chirp. I love it. It’s the only way to program my Baofeng UV-R(+) radios… Period.

Also I love that I can download repeater settings according to a zip code, county, state, etc…

I wanted to use Chirp for my Yaesu FTM-400XDR. However it looks like Chirp doesn’t support this model. So my initial reaction was to create the repeater list with Chirp, export on CSV, and import it to Yaesu.

But, that wasn’t possible either since Yaesu expects the data in a different order and format.

I wrote a small python script that rearranges and reformats the CSV file to the expected import file for the Yaesu’s own software. Check out the README to read how you can install and use the script.

By the way, Yaesu’s software to program the radio doesn’t work on Mac OS X natively, since it’s a Windows software. I managed to run it on Mac OS X using wine. But that’s another blog entry…

OpenVPN client test, without a client.

Emre — Mon, 16 Nov 2015 13:17:34 +0000

If you need to test the connectivity of your openvpn server from a client’s perspective, you can use this command:

echo -e “\x38\x01\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00” | timeout 10 nc -u your.openvpnserver.ip port | cat -v

This sends TLS negotiation header to the server and expects a reply in 10 seconds. If you get an empty line, things timed out. If you get a reply like the line below, you have connectivity.

@M-QM-^MTM-aM-^U^VM-Q^C^@^@^@^@^@@M-QM-^MTM-aM-^U^VM-Q^C^@^@^@^@^@

Stupid freepbx issue

Emre — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 07:32:05 +0000

For a long while I wasn’t able to pinpoint this really stupid issue where my extensions couldn’t call each other however my trunk calls were OK. It first surfaced by not being able to point my BV to my internal extension, but I brushed it out since I had a shitty Comcast router. I first thought that was the culprit.

Then when I was fixing my parents’ extensions in Turkey I realized that I cannot make any extension to extension calls but I still can use outbound routes. After hours of troubleshooting I realized that dialparties.agi script would always return: “Returned from dialparties with no extensions to call and DIALSTATUS:”

I manually ran the script and found out that it was spitting out this error message: “PHP Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_GOTO, expecting T_STRING in /var/lib/asterisk/agi-bin/phpagi.php on line 1234”

Then I found this bug in freepbx Trac. I ended up changing the name of the goto function in line 1234 of phpagi.agi to go_to and things started to work fine.

Apparently this started to happen when I upgraded my ubuntu which upgraded the php to version 5.3.2.