Latest Patches for NowSMS

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Keith Norris
Moderator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 12
Registered: 05-2003
Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 08:05 pm:   

It may not always be obvious, but we're always working on additional features and capabilities for the Now SMS/MMS Gateway.

However, finding out about all of the latest changes and enhancements requires copious reading of the threads on the discussion board.

While we encourage you to read the discussion board for this information, we're also going to try to maintain this thread to contain information on the latest patches and updates for NowSMS in between major releases.

This thread will cover post-v5.51 updates.

The following link contains information about a v5.51a patch:

http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/53/7888.html

And the remainder of this thread will cover patch updates since that release.
Keith Norris
Moderator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 13
Registered: 05-2003
Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 08:13 pm:   

The latest patch for NowSMS is available at http://www.nowsms.com/download/latestpatch.zip.

Please note that in order to install the latest patch, you need to have the current release version of NowSMS installed. At the present time, that is v5.51.

The patch ZIP file then contains all NowSMS components that have been updated since the last release.

Latest Fixes and Enhancements:

SMS Gateway: Add support for modems that only support text SMS messages (no binary SMS messages). For example, some CDMA modems implement the GSM command set for sending text SMS messages. Previously, NowSMS would not work with those modems because NowSMS uses binary PDU mode for sending both text and binary messages. With this update, if a modem only supports text mode, NowSMS will send text messages through the modem in text mode.

MMSC: PreAuth accounting callback was not including a comma between multiple recipients in the PreAuth callback.

SMSGW - DRM Rights Objects: If the "ds:KeyValue" included a null byte, it was previously turncated at the null byte.

More details at http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/8062.html

SMSGW - OMA EMN Settings: Public document id was represented as 0F, should be 0D.

More details at http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/8043.html

MMSC: When receiving from an MM1 VASP to the MMS-IN directory, an extra "TO:" would appear in the header (e.g., To: TO: 9999999999/TYPE=PLMN).

Other issues addressed by this update:

http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/485/8080.html
Keith Norris
Moderator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 14
Registered: 05-2003
Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 09:59 pm:   

WAP Push SL (Service Load) encoding: Public document id was represented as 05, should be 06.

More information at http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/1/8121.html.
Keith Norris
Moderator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 15
Registered: 05-2003
Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 10:49 pm:   

The latest patch also includes another fix that is not mentioned in the text file.

MMSC: Fix for problem where the MMSC would report "user not defined" when attempting to send a message through the very first account defined to the "MMSC Users".

More information at http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/485/7937.html

Please note that to fix a problem with an existing user account definition, you should edit the account and press Ok which will fix the problem.
Keith Norris
Moderator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 16
Registered: 05-2003
Posted on Tuesday, January 25, 2005 - 11:12 pm:   

MMSC: When sending MMS notification messages via a WAP Push Proxy Gateway (PPG), our POST request needs to include quote characters around the Content-type: "type=" parameter value in order to adhere to the MIME specifications.

More discussion: http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/485/8216.html

MMSC: Add configuration parameter to allow UAProf files to be downloaded via an HTTP proxy server (when MMSC does not have direct internet connectivity). To enable this, edit MMSC.INI, and under [MMSC] header, add UAProfProxy=ip.address:port to specify the IP address and port of the HTTP proxy.
Keith Norris
Moderator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 17
Registered: 05-2003
Posted on Tuesday, February 08, 2005 - 09:02 pm:   

Another update was posted on February 7, 2005.

MMSC: Add configuration option to limit the number of retries for processing of messages in the MMS Outbound Routing queue, which contains messages that are being routed to an external MMSC connection (EAIF, MM1, MM4, MM7). By default, retries will be performed for 24 hours, with the retry interval moving from 1 minute to 2 minutes to 3 minutes, up to 15 minutes per retry. To limit the number of retries, under the [MMSC] section of MMSC.INI, it is now possible to specify VASPQRetryMaxAttempts=##.

More Discussion at http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/485/8212.html

MMSC: When sending MMS notification messages via a WAP Push Proxy Gateway (PPG), our POST request needs to include quote characters around the Content-type: "type=" parameter value in order to adhere to the MIME specifications.

MMSC: Add configuration parameter to allow UAProf files to be downloaded via an HTTP proxy server (when MMSC does not have direct internet connectivity). To enable this, edit MMSC.INI, and under [MMSC] header, add UAProfProxy=ip.address:port to specify the IP address and port of the HTTP proxy.

MMSC: When automatically generating SMIL for e-mail to MMS messages, include a "dur='5000ms'" parameter on the paragraph header. Previously this attribute was only included when a message required multiple pages, but it is now included for single page messages. This was necessary because some versions of the P900 would display a blank message.

MMSC: MM7 delivery reports were not including the correct message id. (Worked properly in v5.51, but was broken in initial v5.51a release when support for multiple MM7 schema versions was added.)

More discussion at http://support.nowsms.com/discus/messages/485/8258.html

Keith Norris
Moderator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 18
Registered: 05-2003
Posted on Friday, March 11, 2005 - 02:44 am:   

Update posted March 10, 2005: (http://www.nowsms.com/download/latestpatch.zip)

MMSC: When automatically generating SMIL for e-mail to MMS messages, specify the character set for the SMIL as UTF-8.

MMSC: Add support for "display only" recipients when routing messages that are received from a VASP via EAIF or MM7.

SMS Gateway: Increase the allowed size for the "preferred connection" list associated with a modem. Previous limit was 100, increased to 10000.

MMSC: Add configuration option to block certain MIME types from being delivered to an MMS recipient when NowSMS is acting as the MMSC. This option is being implemented primarily to deal with potential MMS virus threats, where infected Symbian applications are being spread to Nokia Series 60 phones through MMS. To block executable MIME types, create a file named MMSBLOCK.TXT in the NowSMS program directory. In this file, list one MIME content type per line, specifying content types to be blocked. We recommend the following entries in this file to prevent Symbian and Java executables from being distributed via MMS:

application/vnd.symbian.install
application/java-archive
application/x-java-archive
text/vnd.sun.j2me.app.descriptor

This functionality requires that "Dynamic Image + Audio Conversion" be enabled for the MMSC.

For background information on this current virus threat, see http://www.electricnews.net/news.html?code=9592732
Keith Norris
Moderator
Username: Admin

Post Number: 20
Registered: 05-2003
Posted on Thursday, April 28, 2005 - 08:32 pm:   

v5.51b Update posted April 28, 2005: (http://www.nowsms.com/download/latestpatch.zip)

SMS/SMPP: If the SMSC returns a throttling error (ESME_RTHROTTLED), previous versions of NowSMS would delay 15 seconds before attempting to process another message over that SMPP connection. This default delay has been changed to 5 seconds. It has been observed that some SMSCs might return this error condition when it will not accept any more messages for a particular phone number, in which case a general delay is not desirable. To change this delay, edit SMSGW.INI, and under the [SMSGW] header, add SMPPThrottleErrorDelay=##, where ## is a number of seconds. SMPPThrottleErrorDelay=0 will disable the delay.

SMS Gateway/OMA OTA: Update OMA OTA settings to not require a WAP Gateway/Proxy address. If the WAP Gateway IP field is left blank, internet only settings will be sent out.

MMSC: Some operator MMSCs do not like a blank subject header. When routing a message from SMTP to MMS, if there is no subject header, or the subject header is blank, do not include a subject header in the resulting MMS message. (Alternatively, edit MMSC.INI, and under the [MMSC] header, add MMSNoSubject=xyz, where xyz is the text to be inserted as the subject when a subject header is not present in a message received from SMTP.)

SMS Gateway: Update retry logic when an SMSC connection is off-line. By default, if NowSMS cannot connect to an SMSC (or initialise a modem), it will wait 20 seconds before attempting another connection. For each successive connection failure, NowSMS will wait an additional 20 seconds (e.g., 40 seconds after 2 failures, 60 seconds after 3 failures, etc.), up to a maximum of 300 seconds (5 minutes) between retries. The reason for these delays is to adhere to various operator guidelines which are designed to prevent an SMSC from becoming overloaded with reconnections when recovering from a failure. It is possible to modify these retry timings with SMSGW.INI file parameters, where the following parameters are supported under the [SMSGW] section header: InitRetryDelay=#### specifies a number of seconds to wait to retry after a connection failure, the default value is 20. InitRetryDelayMultiplier=### specifies a multiplier to be applied for successive connection failures, the default value is 1. For each failed attempt, the retry delay will be the product of InitRetryDelay+((InitRetryDelay-1)*InitRetryDelayMultiplier*#FailedAttempts). To use a fixed retry delay of InitRetryDelay, specify InitRetryDelayMultiplier=0. InitRetryDelayAfterAttempts=### specifies that the retry delay should only be applied after ### failed attempts, the default value is 1. InitRetryDelayMax=### specifies the maximum number of seconds that NowSMS will allow to elapse between connection retries, the default value is 300.

SMS Gateway: Fix for "Now SMS Web Interface" link on program menu not working when running under a Terminal Services or Remote Desktop session.

MMSC: When DRM content is included in an MMS message, if the boundary includes some special characters like "=", the boundary parameter is now encoded as a quoted string.

MMSC: When defining an MM4/SMTP external connection, if the "E-Mail Domain" field contains a "@", then any messages for this route are routed to the e-mail address specified in this field. This is a simple way to redirect a specific phone number or short code to an e-mail address.

SMPP Client: Add an advanced configuration parameter to tell NowSMS to use SMPP "Optional TLV" parameters to specify when messages are addressed to specific port numbers or when long messages are segmented. (If this parameter is not specified, NowSMS encodes this information in the UDH.)

MMSC: If an MMS client attempts to use the optional "MMBox" commands defined for MMS 1.2, return an appropriate error code to indicate that these commands are not supported. ("MMBox" commands would be used to allow clients to store previously received messages on the server, and are defined as an optional for support in the MMS specifications.)

SMS Gateway/SMPP: If "iso-8859-1" is selected as the character set for an SMSC connection, assume that this character set is also used for received messages if the SMSC does not explicitly set the character set for these messages.

SMS Gateway/SMPP: Add support for specifying premium rate SMS parameters when connecting to mBlox over SMPP. To enable this feature, edit SMSGW.INI, and add the following section:

[SMPPOptions]
mblox_operator=1402,String,5
mblox_tariff=1403,String,5

When these settings are present, additional parameters are supported when submitting a message to NowSMS via an HTTP URL request. "&SMPPOption_mblox_operator=" will specify a value for the destination operator. "&SMPPOption_mblox_tariff" will specify a value for the premium rate tariff associated with the message. For additional information on these parameters, please refer to the mBlox SMPP Gateway Version 3.0 Manual.

When these SMSGW.INI file settings are present, NowSMS will also route these parameters to HTTP-based 2-way commands. If a message is received which contains values for either of these settings, NowSMS will automatically append "&SMPPOption_mblox_operator=value" and/or "&SMPPOption_mblox_tariff=" to the 2-way URL.

MMSC: If a user submits a message to multiple e-mail addresses by putting a "," or ";" between the addresses, instead of using the multiple recipient functionality of the MMS client, then recognise the "," or ";" as recipient separators and route the message to multiple recipients.

MMSC: When automatically generating SMIL for e-mail to MMS messages, an option has been added to specify that a "dur=" parameter be included in the paragraph headers. By default, if the message only requires a single page (paragraph element), then no "dur=" parameter will be specified. If a message requires multiple pages, a "dur='5000ms'" parameter will be included in the paragraph header. However, these settings may not be appropriate for all environments. Additionally, there is a bug in some versions of the SonyEricsson P900 where messages will display as blank if a pargraph header does not have a "dur=" parameter. To override the default behaviour, include an EMailAutoSmilParDur=xxxxx parameter in MMSC.INI under the [MMSC] header, where "xxxxx" specifies a duration in milliseconds (ms) or seconds (s) such as "5000ms" (5000 milliseconds = 5 seconds) or "30s" (30 seconds).