Problems with nowsms gateway

Problems with nowsms gateway SearchSearch
Author Message
Jimmy
Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 08:02 am:   

Hi,

I've downloaded the nowsms gateway and installed into my pc with a gsm modem connected to my pc. I've tried to compose an MMS from the nowsms web interface and send it to a mobile number which is my own number. I have only one sim card. First I put my sim card into the gsm modem, and when i send out to my own number, I took own the sim card and put it into my mms enabled phone T68i. I receive the message i sent using the nowsms web interface, but the message is in SMS. And when i opened the SMS, it shows out weird codes, and here are some codes that can only be recognized

application/vnd.wap.mms-message
and the sms contains this url
http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/20030528/00/25AC1A8A.MMS
which i think is the mms stored in my computer.

Can anyone help me on this? I've got to get this working in a few days time. Thx very much. ^^

Jimmy
Jimmy
Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 08:21 am:   

I have composed mms using Nokia MMS Java library, and send the MMS using the nowsms gateway, but still receives the same problem. Is it because i cant send MMS to myself? Or the exchanging sim card from GSM modem to my t68i is a bad practice?

Jimmy
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support (Bryce)
Posted on Wednesday, May 28, 2003 - 03:22 pm:   

Jimmy,

If you could get another SIM card, I think that would be helpful.

Or, get a cable (serial or USB) for the T68i so that it can be used as the GSM modem (you can't use NowSMS to receive MMS through the T68i, but you can send through the T68i). With the right drivers, the T68i can also be connected to the gateway using infrared or bluetooth.

I can't guarantee that the problem that you are seeing is because you are swapping SIMs.

What you are seeing is the binary content of the MMS notification message appearing as a text SMS. I've seen a few situations where particular firmware versions in a GSM phone acting as a modem did not allow binary SMS messages to be sent correctly ... so I'd be curious what type of GSM modem you have.

Another thought ... where SIM swapping could be an issue.

On most networks, if you are sending a message to yourself, it is pretty difficult to stop the modem before it receives the message that it sent to itself. It is likely that the modem is setup to store the received SMS on a SIM card. When you put the SIM card into the T68i, it sees that there is an SMS on the SIM card, but it doesn't realize that it is a special SMS message. This is because normally the T68i would receive a special SMS message (like an MMS notification) and process it directly, never putting it into an SMS storage area.

So the more I think about it, the more I think that the SIM swapping could be a problem.

-bn
Jimmy
Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2003 - 04:20 am:   

Hi Bryce,

Thanks for your reply.
I'm using a Wavecom gsm modem connected to my pc via serial port. So i think it would not be a modem issue.
I've follow some guidelines in this discussion board and made some configurations to the MMSC.INI, SMSGW.INI and was able to push the MMS into the MMS inbox in the t68i using the same swapping SIM method(will be getting another SIM card soon).
Now when the t68i tries to download the MMS, an error occurs showing 'Network Communication Error. Please Check your settings' Could it be that i have to change the settings in my t68i in order to fetch the MMS? Is it maybe because the network operator has firewall which disable me to download it? I'm in Singapore using M1 service, thanks for going through my problems.

Jimmy
Jimmy
Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2003 - 11:15 am:   

For the issue of SIM swapping, could it be that when the t68i connects to retrieve the MMS, i have to have a SIM card inside my GSM modem to send out the MMS again? Means that when the MMS is first being sent, i remove the SIM card from the GSM modem and transfer to t68i and open the MMS. It seems like it is connecting to the URL to retrieve the MMS from my PC. So, could it be that i need to have a SIM card inside the GSM modem to send the MMS again to the t68i, so that the MMS can be downloaded and read? Hope you understand what i meant.

I'll be attaching the necessary log files for you, hope you can take time to help me on this. Thanks
Bryce Norwood - NowSMS Support (Bryce)
Posted on Thursday, May 29, 2003 - 03:07 pm:   

Jimmy,

If the phone is recognising the message as an MMS notification, then it sounds like you've gotten around any issue of timing of the SIM swap.

It could be a firewall issue, but I wouldn't jump straight to that conclusion ... there could be a configuration error as well.

The phone gets pushed an MMS notification message with a URL that points back to the Now SMS/MMS Gateway. If the "Local Host Name or IP Address" configured on the "MMSC" page of the configuration dialog is not correct, or is not accessible over the internet, then that could be an issue.

Also, some operators have a firewall around their WAP gateway that prevents the WAP gateway from connecting to content servers on ports other than 80. So if the "HTTP Port number" on the "MMSC" page of the configuration dialog is set to something other than 80, some operator WAP gateways will block connections to it (for no good reason).

On the firewall/settings issue, go into Messages/MMS/Options/WAP Profile/Select ... and compare that WAP profile against the one configured in the WAP browser (WAP Services/Select Profile to view which profile is active for the WAP browser).

You can see detail about profile settings by looking at WAP Services/Options/WAP Profiles.

If it is a firewall issue, you might be able to get things working by changing the profile that is active for MMS to match the one that is active for WAP. (But this might prevent MMS from the operator from working.)

Unfortunately, the only way to get around the firewall issue is to change the way we do things ... we're working on a new version that has a variety of options for submitting messages through operator MMSCs, in addition to the current approach.

Or another suggestion, if MMS is blocked, make more use of WAP push for your content.

-bn