OsmoHLR and IPA unit id

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Neels Hofmeyr nhofmeyr at sysmocom.de
Fri Feb 24 05:43:26 UTC 2017


I just ran my first tests of both OsmoNITB and OsmoSGSN connecting to OsmoHLR.
It turns out OsmoHLR uses the ipaccess_unit data a.k.a. CCM (whatever CCM
means) to route GSUP replies back to its sender.

It looks like "NAME-00-00-00-00-00-00".

However, all of our GSUP client code simply sets the unit id to:
"SGSN-00-00-00-00-00-00".

The result is that the VLR never receives an UPDATE LOCATION RESULT, because it
is sent to the SGSN instead, since that was the first one to say that it is
"SGSN-00...".

I would extend the GSUP clients to allow setting an ID from VTY, or maybe a
random ID. At this point it would suffice to make the MSC side say it is
"MSC-00-00-00-00-00-00" but that's beside the point.

Do we really want to do that? Any peer could come along and say it is someone
else, very easy to misconfigure (and not very security sensitive when thinking
of OAP -- which we're not using but maybe we will one day).

For some messages, OsmoHLR uses the conn pointer from msg rx to route the
response back -- that works. AFAICT it just receives messages and replies to
them right away (but haven't seen / understood all of it). For the case of the
UPDATE LOCATION RESULT, it would also be possible to use the same conn pointer,
but the code chooses to resolve by id and then sends to the wrong peer. If it
used the peer's IP address and port instead, things would work out.

With the attached and possibly very stupid patch, OsmoHLR works for me with
both MSC and SGSN talking to it even though they have identical IPA IDs: I
bluntly store the conn in struct lu_operation and re-use it later.

Which way shall we resolve this?

~N
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