[Mimedefang] [WAY OT] As a punchline to the baby bells

[Ben Kamen]

Matt Wrote:

> Just recently the telephone guys where having problems with some
> equipment not ringing after a voip conversion, so he broke out his
> scope, and discovered the voip equipment wasn't generating a proper
> ring.  The vendors tech support sure wasn't expecting the following
> phone call.  I would be willing to bet that that was the first time ring
> problems had been reported at the frequency level.

I wrote a callerID decoder (the CLASS service, not ANI) for my RS/6000 in TCL 
(Dave Skoll should like that) which had a rolling LED message board plugged into 
it for my amusement.

After I wrote the decoder to BellCore specs for MDMF (Multi-Data Message 
Format), I got a call from a friend of mine and the script exited out with an 
error (fully logged).

I found that in the packets the local telco was sending me (SBC/Ameritech), the 
name field which was supposed to be preceeded by a message length byte (in this 
case it was decimal 10) was being followed by 13bytes of ASCII name information.

Thus, the message's checksum was in the wrong place.

Besides having to basically re-write the script to ignore the BellCore 
standards, I attempted (more for my own amusement than anything) to call the 
phone company to let them know they are transmitting bad CallerID data.

Wanna know how many people understood what I was talking about? (I spoke to like 
3 supervisors).

You guess it - Zero.

Hahaha...

  -Ben

-- 
Ben Kamen - O.D.T, S.P.
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Email: ben at benjammin.net                      http://www.benjammin.net