On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:48:05PM -0500, Todd T. Fries wrote: > Special shout out to Chris Fey who in a post back in May of 2008 mentioned > a link I had found ..
Hi Todd, Welcome to Barry! It is always good to have more testers on platforms that I don't have common access to. I'm assuming you are referring to my posts to openbsd-tech. Thanks for the followup. > I'm quite interested now in getting barry to work on OpenBSD, considering it > is what I use and support, and after having blackberries for over a year my > wife and I managed to both within a month come into a scenario where the > m$ desktop manager is necessary to restore the software from scratch and > we get to pray that it backs up the contact/calendar/etc properly. > > Mine didn't go so hot a few weeks ago, and I lost everything. > > Now we get to do the same with my wife's tonight. > > Suffice it to say, it is going to work one way or another, because we can't > afford another loss like this again.. I'm not aware of what would require a firmware-and-everything reload, except for a password entered incorrectly too many times. What caused this? And are you currently able to do backups on the device? You might want to backup with both the Windows software, and barrybackup, and perhaps even btool. The more formats you have backups in, the better, even if it is just a text dump from btool. > You never quite got your answers back then, Chris, regarding the finer points > of userland vs kernel abstraction in OpenBSD. > > Basically, if it requires privileges, its better in the kernel, and if it is > following a standard interface api, its better in the kernel. If the userland > apps require a special protocol its better in userland. pppoe strattles this > fence quite thoroughly as there are both kernel and userland implenentations. Nothing has changed much in Barry land with regard to kernel integration. So far, it works quite well, just using libusb for all usb operations. When I talked about the possibility of a kernel driver for the modem feature in the OpenBSD kernel, it wasn't really a recommendation. It was just to point out that it would be fairly simple to implement in the kernel, if that's where people think it should reside. The desktop / database code relies on USB, and while I do provide an API through the libbarry library, I don't think it is stable enough to go into the kernel yet. > Based on everything I've seen wrt blackberry and barry etc I believe long term > it would be best if OpenBSD could just provide a serial connection and umass > and perhaps another special interface for talking to the blackberry. > > Does barry use the serial connection to do calendar/phonenumber/etc stuff or > does it require some alternate communication mechanism? The databases are accessed through the USB, using libusb. The protocol is specific to the Blackberry, and the packets are created and parsed in the libbarry library. It doesn't use bluetooth, although I understand that it would be possible to access the databases over bluetooth as well. Barry provides modem support with the "pppob" (PPP Over Blackberry) program, which also uses the USB bus. pppob works the same as pppoe as far as pppd is concerned, although the only kernel hooks used by pppob are the USB interface calls used by libusb. > In the meantime, disabling umass on the blackberry and/or specifically > compiling > an OpenBSD kernel to not recognize the blackberry as anything other than ugen > and/or disabling uberry(4) and umass(4) should at the very least make barry a > viable tool on OpenBSD. > > Have you heard of anyone making a port of barry to OpenBSD? I'll do it, I > just > don't want to duplicate any work. I've heard of maybe two people using Barry on OpenBSD, but I assume there are more out there. Bill Paul posted on this list while he was getting Barry working on FreeBSD as well. Support for the BSDs should be there out of the box. I haven't touched OpenBSD since that May 2008 email to the openbsd-tech list, but when I did try it, things worked very well... it was only uberry that caused a conflict. Once that was moved out of the way, Barry worked fine. There should be no need to do a porting effort for Barry on OpenBSD. At most, general polishing might be needed to get it to the "easy" stage. :-) And maybe some well-defined mechanism to make Barry and uberry coexist better. I would greatly appreciate your help on making Barry easier to use on OpenBSD. Please report any problems you have in getting it working. - Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Crystal Reports - New Free Runtime and 30 Day Trial Check out the new simplified licensing option that enables unlimited royalty-free distribution of the report engine for externally facing server and web deployment. http://p.sf.net/sfu/businessobjects _______________________________________________ Barry-devel mailing list Barry-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/barry-devel
