SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Did you install smscon yet? Did you configure it properly? If not, this post is for you.

One and half months ago smscon appeared as a new software on maemo's download page.
I've downloaded it immediately, yet needed one more day to find the time to do the configuration.
At that moment I couldn't bother too much to find my provider's smtp address or to set ssh user on my server etc. so I just registered my sim card ("add imsi") and set a default mobile number to contact.

If only I would have known that my mobile is about to get stolen at that very same afternoon, I would have put more effort into the setting.

Since Murphy's Law didn't skip me and I found myself couple of hours later wondering where did my backpack (with my mobile) disappear, i've used a friend's phone to activate the magical software.

The first "Location" command worked pretty well and showed me a position which was not so far away (just down the street).
about half an hour later I got a message with the details of the new sim card that was insert into my device.

At this point I was already on my way to the police to file a report.

Unfortunately, the GPS accuracy wasn't good enough to tell the exact house and the police refused to send somebody to that location. The newly inserted sim card was a pre-paid and I was told that the police can't do anything again hence it's not registered to a specific person.

In the following week I got about 3 or 4 messages with new sim card number. I reported all of them to the officer taking care of this case but the only thing I got back was a speech about how many mobile phones get stolen every day and that the police can't find all of them...
Honestly, at that point I was a bit hopeless.

Just for the record I must say that every time I got a message with a new sim number I send immediately a "location" and "trackon" commands to the new number but somehow it never worked again.

Last weekend I got an official letter that the case has been closed due to lack of evidences and of course lack of public interest.
At this moment Murphy got into action again and two days later (after 5 weeks of silence) I got another message with a new sim number.

This time I had nothing to lose, so I simply called that number and told the person on the other side my story.
Luckily that person was very cooperative and two days later we met and after prooving him, that this phone really is mine (with the imei number) he gave it back to me.
(He claimed to have bought it from a poor gambler who needed money in the local casino. If it's true or not, I don't really care)

This is not where my story totally ends:
Obviously the thieves erased all my personal data and restored the system to factory setting.
So with the help of "PhotoRec" (very recommended tool!!!) I could restored all my files. It was the lost pictures that I was mostly caring about.
In my photo directory I had a little surprise.
The thieves took a picture of themselves. :-)
If you wonder how I know that it is the thieves and not someone else? Well, the timestamp in the exif show that it happened immiatly after the theft.

So 44 days later my story got a happy end.

In the meanwhile I bought another N900 (call me an addict) and I had the chance to test smscon more thoroughly. Here are some of my conclusions:

1) give your gps time-out enough time. the default 600 sec is very often not enough!! (I set mine to an hour).

2) If the network positioning (a-gps) is disabled. the gps will pop up a message asking whether to activate it or not.
This is of course not ideal if you don't want the thief to know that you activated the gps.

3) Your only chance to recover the phone is if you do not lock it on new sim !!! otherwise it becomes a paper weight.

4) E-Mail sending never worked for me, neither in test nor with sms command.

5) Even if you don't have a server get yourself a domain and do configure the ssh setting! You can always set a server afterwards. Just keep the details somewhere safe, so you could set a server with a user and password accordingly.

6) rename your commands!!! Make them look like a spam (e.g. "party tonight in ...")
and keep the list of the commands somewhere safe of course.

7) Don't forget that each sms command sent to your phone change the mobile number to contact. Don't use mobile phone of people who you might not have contact to afterwards!

One more time a huge thank to the authors Frank Visser (smscon) and Christos Saturn (smscon editor).

Lovely greetings and keep your mobile safe.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

WOW! Glad you got your N900 back :D
btw police is just useless for such cases. both bother contacting them if u lose you mobile :P

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Amazing story indeed.

I'll ping Frank. It's the right motivation he might need to work and push the latest update we've left half baked. :)

If you don't mind, in which country did all this happen?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

The story took place in Germany.

If you, Frank or anybody want more details, please post your e-mail and I´d be happy to contact you also directly.

good night

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

How did photorec recover files from a wiped disk?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

When I got the device again it was in the following condition:

The same software as when I lost it.
All personal data gone. (e.g. Address book etc.)
logs (e.g. Phone call list etc.) erased.

I don't know what the thieves did exactly but it seems that the mmc card was not formatted but simply erased.
Anyway, PhotoRec did a good job to recover most (but not all) my picture files.

I must add to it that I was pretty lucky to deal with stupid thieves.
Had they re-flashed the device. I would have never got it again.


by the way, does anybody know where extcalllog's files are? I'd like to try and restore them too.

almost good morning...

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Does SMScon get removed on reflashing?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Cool story indeed :D btw did u gave those pictures to police? :D I'm sure they'll love to chat with them ;)

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

To the best of my understganding smscon is a software like any other and therefore is removed once reflashed.

It would be great if smscon could be integrated into the flash image and if the settings could have been kept between flashes. (similar to the device's PIN code).

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

SMSCON is indeed mere software erased with a reflash. The only way you'd make it more resilient than that is if you find some maemo exploit that lets you run software from the MyDocs partition, or install software from there. Said exploit would then have to be one that makes it self-trigger upon every boot or something. (The lock code isn't something you run, it's not a program, just a hash somewhere of the password. You can't really store executable programs in most of the space immune from flashing, and those you can store, you can't make auto-execute that I know of, meaning that a reflash would wipe anything that actually tells the N900 to load the program at boot, even if the program itself is there and executable.)

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

just ... WOW!

Cool story, bro'! And I DON'T mean that sartastically!

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

hmm... after reading this I'm going to install smscon right away :)

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

If the software is installed to /home/users then it will remain after a reflash.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

YES, we have a success story!

Saturn (developer of SMSCON-editor) has pointed me to this post. I'm the developer of SMSCON. Due to lack of time & other reasons I wasn't present on this forum for some time.

Great succes indeed, finally we have a successful story! I'm very, very pleased that SMSCON did work for you and did get your phone back. Luckily that guy was cooperative. He probably feld the heat that he was tracked by you :) and you could give him strong evidence...

I will post in the official SMSCON thread more info for the upcoming 0.8 version of SMSCON & SMSCON-editor.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

I will indeed remain but after a reflash it won't automatically start when the device boots... so no working smscon...

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Did you took the photos of thieves to the police and if, what did they do?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

IIRC, windows mobile 6 used to have an developed by the guys at xda-developers that performed like SMSCon. But it had a feature whereby the software would be active even after a reset (and I think, but not sure reflash) .
I will try to remember/google the app and post it here, maybe it can give you some ideas? Or is it useless as wm6 and maemo are as different as the sun and moon?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Thanks for the post. I've now installed SMSCon (and the Editor) and can gladly say, that it is working just fine. I had some trouble getting the e-mail to work but the port was wrong so it was as easy as that.

And please do note : once you've got the SSH-connection to work you can control the device from that server, that you've set up. The connection is:

It's visible in the Wiki, please do read that throughly. Again, thank you for posting this post. Really useful, since, as already mentioned, SMSCon-dev's now have a successful story to refer to and users can trust on the software. :)

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

For all of you who wondered:

Of course I gave the police the photos.

This story was pretty funny by itself, since they first asked me to print the photos and send them via (good old fashion) post.
It took me some time to convinced the officer that a digital file is best for everybody (exif, face recognition software, a bit faster etc.) until he was willing to give me an e-mail address.
(I'm not sure if it's a policy or technical difficulty but apparently they don't communicate with citizen via e-mail in the police here).

Anyway I promise to keep this thread updated with the following developments but it might take some time.

And I want to thank everybody for the warm feedbacks. I was a bit overwhelmed to see so quickly so many positive replies.

have a lovely day.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

MORAL of the story.
1.install SMS con if you dont have one.I am going to do that.
2.please believe that police response is same everywhere in the world.I really admire INDIAN police that,though they have shown lots of first information reports of stolen mobiles ,at least one constable tried his best to get the mobile (N96) back.later he concluded that it might have been dismantled and sold parts wise:D
3.keep your mobile safe atleast for your private files.I lost three nokias in a row.
4.lets thank frank and saturn.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Well done for getting it back!

I'm glad that the person didn't turn violent when you tried to take it back, or try and mug you for more things; sounds like an opportunity theft originally from someone not a hardcore criminal who then sold it on as soon as they could. You were lucky the new owner was as honest and also not out to scam you or make it worse for you.

I've also been very glad that I finally got round to installing and setting up smscon before my trip to the US late last year, though not as useful.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Even if you could have smscon stay in operation (not just on the phone in MyDocs or wherever) after a basic flash, that then leaves you the chance to have a completely bricked phone and not be able to recover it; flashing should wipe everything.

Hopefully many thieves/accidental-loss picker-uppers won't know that and they'll see the "return to factory" thing and just use that. There are too many different types of phones in the world for a regular joe to know how to clear all of them properly! Especially if they're just after selling it for cash rather than keeping it for themselves.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Glad to see you recover the phone.

After reading this, I'm leaving my laziness and installing SMSCON right now!

Thank you developers, and thank you OP.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Am i right that SMSCon is useless if you have a lock-code?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

What do you mean exactly?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

I have a lock code, so when i reboot i have to type it in for the phone to boot up. I read on the SMScon thread that having this negates the point of SMSCon because it will just stay at the lock screen and so the app won't be able to start

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

I would recommend you to active the following option:
smscon editor > general > unlock on new sim

Otherwise you're right. if the device is locked. It would find its way to the next garbage can very fast.

I didn't test if it works when the device is locked by default but if you have a second sim card, let us know...

greetings

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

What would have happened if you repeatedly made the phone call the emergengy police number (whatever equivalent of 911 you got over there)?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

@TiagoTiago
I imagine the thieves would pretty quickly put the phone in as sack, throw the sack in a river, and hurl the river into space.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Last night I tried to analyzed the data on my phone and see if I could get something useful out of it such as gps coordinates or call list while it was out of my possession.

In the conversation log I've seen that the phone did receive my "Location" and "Trackon" commands, even though I never got replies to them.
They were also several times that the phone tried to send sms by itself but couldn't do that due to lack of credit on the (pre-paid) sim cards.
(You see a response message from the service provider) so I assume that those were messages triggered by smscon.
Unfortunately I couldn't see what was the original message.

I therefore checked the log in /tmp/smscon.log, but that file was extremely shot.

Could it be that the log file is erased with every phone or deamon restart?
If this is true I think it would be a good idea to keep all smscon logs and maybe even give the option to send it pair e-mail or upload it somewhere as a file etc.)

To this matter, does anybody know if the gps keeps a log somewhere.

lovely greetings

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

I do not think it is good to have SMSCON conversation now in two different threads. The SMSCON success story was good, but now some feature requests and support requests maybe are better in the real SMSCON thread?

Do not know if this thread should be merged to the "real" one or not?

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

point taken.

I'll post my question and wish list in the SMSCon thread.

thanks.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

I've promised to keep you guys and girls updated, so here I am again:

Couple of days ago I got an invitation to give a testimony in court. :-)

This came to me as a surprise hence the police didn't update me before that they have a suspect .

The trial will take place only in couple of days, so I'll update you again as things will develop.

If anybody is interested to follow the case directly or come to court please leave your email or phone (in Germany) and I'll send you the details of the trial.

once again, thank to the Frank Visser (smscon) and Christos Saturn (smscon editor).

Lovely greetings and keep your mobile safe.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

@bugfix178,

Which part of Germany? (I'm in Munich)

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Hauptstadt

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

165km south here.:D

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

i have 3 questions guys:

is it normal that if you pressed call at the test menu at smscon-editor after specifieng the number
and the call won't work

what does adding imie number do ?

how to set ssh server ?

thanks in advance

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

Nice. I missed this thread when it was posted I guess...

But i just installed smscon a couple days ago and have been tinkering with it.

Its great to see a success story. Thanks.

Re: SMSCON. Thank you!
 

There´s another thread for smscon here:
http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=60729
I think you might find an answer there and your question would be more suitable there as well.

If you have a success story, please post it here.

greetings