Navaho Gunleg

While playing around with Zabbix, I discovered that my modem doesn’t support SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol). Actually, I already discovered it when I once played around with MRTG but at that time I simply gave up (my expect script wasn’t really stable either).

But not this time.

This time I wrote myself a little telnet-like client that can log in to the modem, execute a specific command, and abort the connection.

Lo and behold, the utility ‘alcatell‘ was born:

alcatell: Alcatel Speed Touch Home utility v. 0.1.20060320

Usage: alcatell [-u user] -p pass -h hostname [command]

Options:
-u user -p password
-h hostname

Notes:
- Username can generally be ignored on most models and -p / -h should suffice.
- Default command is 'ip iflist'

So what does it do? Well, basically it logs into your modem through the telnet-interface and execute the passed command. This can be anything the modem understand, from ‘ip iflist’ to ‘nat list’.

You could even re-boot the sucker.

Download & Installation
You can download the latest version (0.1-20060320) right here. Extract the tar-ball and open the file ‘alcatell.h’ in your favourite editor: if you want you can hard-code the credentials (username, password and hostname). If you do not, you will have to pass these on the command-line.

After (not) making these modifications, you can do a ‘make all’ to compile the required binary. (A ‘make install’ will copy it to /usr/local/bin for you.)

If installed, and passed the correct parameters, calling ‘alcatell’ should return something like this:

~$ alcatell -uuser -ppass -hmodem "ip iflist"
Interface GRP MTU RX TX TX-DROP STATUS HWADDR
0 loop 1 1500 176 0 0 UP
1 eth0 2 1500 28342952 40332504 0 UP 00:90:d0:22:fe:46
2 MXS 0 1500 39916249 26277449 0 UP
3 cip0 0 9180 0 0 0 UP


Now, ain’t that cute…

UNIX, C, Utilities, Alcatel, alcatell