Notices

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.

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

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?

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

How did photorec recover files from a wiped disk?

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...

Does SMScon get removed on reflashing?

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

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).

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.)