IRC for your mobile - Wap-IRC gateway v0.30

Preface

I am Tomas Vilda, student studying at University of Vilnius, Lithuania. I started interested in wap when I bought my first wap enabled mobile phone. I searched for the running irc-wap gateway. But with no success. Actually, I found some, but no such, that I make to connect to specified IRC server. Then I found wapirc gateway written by Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>. I tried it on my FreeBSD server. During compilation I got error, because of bad Makefile. So I compiled it by correcting Makefile and ran successful. My mobile is Siemens C55. To start using this wapirc gateway I have to make some modifications. They are listed below.

Changes from ORIGINAL wapirc gateway v0.2

wapirc gateway v0.30 (2004.03.13) thanks for Sven Dickert

• cgi/main():refresh included into main-cgi, saves us .htaccess and external wmlscript
• cgi/write_wml(): fixed bug in linked nicks with ACTIONs and '*' in there.
• server/parseinput(): Added /me Command for '*' ACTION in channels
• cgi/write_card(): get refresh timer from config.h
• server/removeallitems(): doing a list cleanup when disconnecting, so we can rejoin after quit without part
• server/print_out(): screenbuffer with latest messages, scrolling top down
• cgi/write_card(): reload on a regular basis, when not typing something in. New formular works on more phones, informative header
• cgi/wml_link()/wml_header(): wml1.2 compatible links/input field for accesskey element
• cgi/write_wml(): new linewise printout, italic makeup, nicks are linked setting defaultvalues for talking on channels and privat.
• cgi/main(): Expire header
• Makefile: make install

wapirc gateway v0.24 (2003.12.31)

• Restored one option from older versions of wapirc config. Now again you have to specify URL of your wapirc.cgi file, because Nokia phones doesn't query same script if no specified. All Nokia users please use newest version.
• Now you can specify IRC server's port in config file without changing source code.
• I got a report that SonyEricson T610 doesn't sends command if there is empty command field. Now it's fixed.

wapirc gateway v0.23 (2003.12.03)

• added support for ctcp queries, now VERSION, FINGER, CLIENTINFO, PID are supported.
• now if your nick is chosen you can type new nick name. On previous versions wapircd exits.

wapirc gateway v0.22 (2003.12.01)

• added support for undernet ircd server to answer automatically to PING signal dalnet servers send signal of type PING :irc.server.name, undernet servers send signal of type PING :UNIQUE_NUMBER.

wapirc gateway v0.21 (2003.11.14)

• corrected wml code (i think this program was tested on Nokia 7100, this phone is like Internet Explorer, that works fine even if code is formated incorectly. Siemens wap browser is very sensitive to formating errors :)
• removed chown function that changed owner of socket file. Simple simple user can't chown, that can do only root.
• umask function only on linux returns value -1 if error accured (it seems, that linux doesn't care unix standarts, the standart is that umask returns new mode that is set in all cases). So sentence "if (umask(077) == -1)" isn't correct. on bsd it returns false in all cases. I left only sentence without condition.
• control characters are not displayed any more (for example using mIRC client you can set color option with character 03h. Siemens wap browser doesn't support control characters and doesn't display page at all.
• corrected Makefile to support GNU and BSD Makefile types, because using ORIGINAL Makefile make command throws errors, because it can't find input files for compilation using GNU Makefile feature '$^'.
• siemens wap browser doesn't allow enter '#' char, it's important sign on IRC now all '~' chars that you enter in command field are translated to '#' char.

Requirements

• Owd BSD, Linux system (on these I have tested wapirc gateway, you can try to configure it on other systems and notice me about changes that need to be made, if such exists), if you don't have your own linux or bsd box, you can buy it from my sponsors, it's firstly cheap, and good support, you can find links on banners below or on top of the page
• CGI enabled web server (I tested only on Apache)

Installation

1. And download sources here from sourceforge.net

2. Extract sources:

$ tar xvzf wapirc_0.30.tar.gz

3. Change current directory to extracted sources:

$ cd wapirc_0.30

4. Edit config.h and Makefile files to change configuration of wapirc gateway (read config.h comments for more details)

5. Compile source files (it produces two output files: wapircd and wapirc.cgi):

$ make && make install

6. Move compiled wapircd to directory that is not accessible using web

7. Run wapircd (NOTICE: NOT AS ROOT)

$ ./wapircd &

8. Now try to access wapirc.cgi using your mobile phone, using URL that you specified in config.h file.

On the first access to wapirc.cgi using your mobile, wapircd deamon will connect to IRC server and you should be able to use it as regular IRC client: send commands starting with '/' character or speak simply entering your words in input field.

Troubleshooting

If you have any questions or troubles getting wapirc gateway to start please feel free to use wapirc forum on sf.net or contact me by email <webmaster@stilius.net>.

Original project sources

You can find them here.

Credits

I want to thank Vytautas Kašėta for help with modifications of wapirc gateway and for webspace for this project

Last documentation update

2004 september 30 (2004 09 30)

Copyright

Original wapirc gateway project is copyrighted to Alan Cox <alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk>. All changes made to this project and this document is copyrighted to Tomas Vilda <webmaster@stilius.net>.

© Tomas Vilda, 2003-2004