bisQuITbox GmbH

batcontrol -- Smart Control for PV Battery Storage

2026-03-10T00:00:00+00:00

Anyone running a photovoltaic system with battery storage knows the challenge: the manufacturer’s built-in software decides when to charge and discharge – often without considering fluctuating electricity prices or actual self-consumption. batcontrol is an open-source alternative that puts the system owner back in control. Currently focused on Fronius inverters, it integrates with Home Assistant and optimizes charge and discharge cycles based on current market data and weather forecasts. Additional connectivity is available through evcc and MQTT.

bisQuITbox actively contributes to the development of batcontrol. The project thrives on a growing community – feedback, bug reports and contributions are welcome. Source code and further information are available on GitHub.

Container escape on zCX - DEFCON 29

2021-09-13T00:00:00+00:00

I can recommend this video about two hackers escaping a running container deployed on IBM zCX feature. It is interesting to see the approach from both sides (z/OS and Linux).

Youtube : DEF CON 29 - Ian Coldwater, Chad Rikansrud - Real Life Story of the 1st Mainframe Container Breakout

Yes, they escaped the linux container. In fact, they did not escape from the virtual machine (running a s390x Linux Ubuntu based image) to the running zCX address space.

I am curious what will come in the future.

Walmart z/OS Services

2018-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

TL;DR: That was kind of an unexpected outcome of today’s session… Walmart published the source code of their internal z/OS-CICS services (zUID, zECS & zFAM)on GitHub!

I visited a pre-Conference of the ceCMG group today, which was given the title: “IBM Z Modernization”. It turned out that two guys from Walmart came in and talked about their success story in turning their Mainframes to a modern system. We are talking about Rich Jackson and Randy Frerking. In fact, both published several Redbooks together with IBM, namely Creating IBM z/OS Cloud Services, How Walmart Became a Cloud Services Provider with IBM CICS and IBM CICS and the Coupling Facility: Beyond the Basics. We are not talking about some application services, but we are talking about system services. These two guys are pushing the limits of the current technology mostly to the edge, and we are talking here about IBM System Z limits.

Those guy started of there idea of a service with a alternative key-value cache based on CICS, VSAM and z/OS facilities. This was the beginning of a long travel, and they are currently running a self service for different z/OS system configuration and management things. And their starting point was the best you can have: make the live easier for you and the others.

Beside third party services, like MQ configuration for development purposes or RACF thing, they started with something else.. basically they implemented three “products”, which they offer to their internal customers (developers) as REST-ful services:

They started the story with zECS, which is mostly a cache storage implementation to store session (or other short living) information outside the running application server. These information need to be gathered fast and high available. Based on the services from the platform, they achieved high throughput rates.
Moving forward to fulfill developer needs, they implemented their own Key-Value store called zFAM. They can store binary information up to 1GB and do not rely on DB2, but are using VSAM.
zUID is the latest, but smaller, project, to offer sort of standardized 32bit UIDs, which are unique.

At the point where I was asking myself, why they do not publish this as a products, they revealed, that it is available to the public via Walmart’s Github account- for free in terms of a APACHE2 License. Currently, there are installation REXX provided for some of the code. Randy talked about moving to a proper git folder structure in the long term, because git is becoming more and more available on z/OS as well… It totally looks very interesting and it is worth a look. It gives you an idea what is possible with exploiting the z/OS services and OS features using assembler.

Matthias@Hacker Hotel - Follow up

2015-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

The given talk went quite well, I think. You can find the recording under this link. Unfortunately, I can’t share the slides directly.

Beside the link list for more information at the bottom of the post, I need to correct or emphasize a few things from the talk here:

The s/360 architecture is built to be not only compatible, as mentioned in the talk. The architecture is binary compatible since 1964!
For the IBM it was a 5 billion dollar bet not like mentioned a 1 billion dollar bet.

Further sources and articles which you may be interested to get more information about mainframes:

In addition I want to show you a very good article about 7 mainframe taboos we should break.

Problems building AttitudeAdjustement OpenWrt

2015-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

I recently encountered a problem building the old version of OpenWrt called “AttitudeAdjustement” on my ArchLinux machine. As ArchLinux is using the most recent sources, a upstream patch landed, which changes the default behaviour of the tool called “grep”.
The same propblem seems to occur on the “oldpackages” repository of BreakingBarrier as well, so that small fix below should work there, too.

Now, it throws a message on Binary files instead of parsing it somehow, which results in the following problem:

$ ./scripts/feeds update  packages
Updating feed 'packages' from 'http://git.openwrt.org/12.09/packages.git' ...
Already up-to-date.
Create index file './feeds/packages.index' 
grep: feeds/packages/Binary: No such file or directory
grep: file: No such file or directory
grep: matches/Makefile: No such file or directory
make: *** No rule to make target 'feeds/packages/Binary', needed by '/home/matze/tmp/LibraryBox-2.1-beta-build-env/openwrt/feeds/packages.tmp/info/.packageinfo-Binary'.  Stop.

That breaks the OpenWrt Buildchain. I found the solution on the GNU mailing list: In the console you are running, change the LC_ALL setting and export it. That makes the grep tool work like before the change:

export LC_ALL=C

After that, you can work like normal:

$ ./scripts/feeds update packages
Updating feed 'packages' from 'http://git.openwrt.org/12.09/packages.git' ...
Already up-to-date.
Create index file './feeds/packages.index' 
Collecting package info: done

Remember to rerun the export when you continue working after closing the terminal window…

Matthias@Hacker Hotel

2015-01-23T00:00:00+00:00

This April I’m heading towards the Netherlands for participating in a hacking event called Hacker Hotel, which will take place in Garderen at the weekend Fri 10 - Sun 12 April 2015.

I’ll do a small PirateBox workshop for beginners.

In a short discussion on the IRC a lot of interest in the topic ‘mainframe’ came up. So, I will talk about is Hacker meets Mainframe. The plan is to do a brief overview of the history, architecture of the mainframe and why it is still a topic which should interest a normal linux-hacker.

I’m looking forward to give the two session and, of course, to see you!

Winter vacation

2014-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

I think, I’m ready for my winter vacation. During the last weeks my ordered hardware arrived:

On the left side you can discover one of my two WRTnodes. I ordered two of them to see how nicely they can work as mesh nodes. On the right side you find the Indiegogo founded project named VoCore, which I mainly use for Piratebox applications.

While I’m fiddling around with the new hardware, I hope you all have a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

See you soon!

How to launch an AWS instance via cron.

2014-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not a big python developer, but I’m able to read documentations. There are several expensive services on the worl wide web, that allows you to start AWS instances using a specific schedule. Some free services do not allow to bring up instances of expensive types like “c3.xlarge”.

For me, that is all too much, because I want to start a prepared AWS-instance once in a week. I created a solution, that uses an available Python library called boto and a common cron on a running linux machine (or a tiny RaspberryPi).
Note: This script does not create an Instance out of AMI-images, but you are able to achieve that as well.

How to setup it?

You need to generate an AWS-service key -link is a documentation about that-, which you need to keep it as secret as your passwords.
Install the python library python-boto.
Create the following script:

from boto.ec2 import EC2Connection
from boto import ec2

conn = ec2.connect_to_region("region-abc",
	aws_access_key_id="access-key",
	aws_secret_access_key="secret" ) 

conn.start_instances( [ "i-4711" ] )

Exchange region-abc to region you instances are located. access-key and secret should be replaced with the API credentials you generated above and the i-4711 you see in your overview on the EC2 list.
Put the script to the crontab like:

1 3 * * 1 python ~/bin/start_aws_instance.py

I use this as a tiny, cheap solution to quickly fire and forget one instance. The script doesn’t fail, if the instance is already up and running. If you use this way to start the instance, you should add a shutdown option in your running AWS-instance. I use a build script fired up right after instance is finished with booting. After the complete script is processed, a norma shutdown -h now is initiated.

I don’t recommend to use this in a large scale or buisiness critical solution, but sometimes you need a “quick win”.

New webpage!

2014-10-27T00:00:00+00:00

Starting today we are running a new webpage, which will I try to keep up to date with interesting things. I discarded the old one and I hope you enjoy our new blog.

best regards
Matthias

Some updates on IBM MQ

2014-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

Last month was Capitalware initiated MQ Technical Conference. There were alot of IBM technicians talking about new features in IBM MQ 8.0 (formerly known as IBM Websphere MQ) or how to use it efficiently.

You can find a complete list of the talks including the slide on the Capitalware MQ Technical Conference page.

Have fun with your studies!

PirateBox 2014 - Lille

2014-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

This year I was able to sponsor with hardware and attend the PirateBoxCamp 2014 like last year, beside the important fact that the camp took place in Lille(FR) - LaCoroutine. LaCoroutine is a Co-Working space and offered us the location and some sort of catering.

Instead of having a bunch of talks we stripped down the agend to only a few overview and update talks. The team and the audience was happy to have several workgroups already on the first day hacking, testing and developing ideas around the PirateBox.

At the end of sunday, we had around 25 visitors sitting together and discuss about social implications of projects like PirateBox.

Special thanks to all organisators and LaCorouting to be our host.

Pictures are licenced under CC-3.0 share alike, taken from piratebox.cc

KnightFoundation is funding LibraryBox

2014-04-30T00:00:00+00:00

This year the Knight Foundation decided to grant projects around the topic “Libraries & Technology” and one of the picked is LibraryBox. Beside the LibraryBox project, another project, called Dewey, is funded that uses PirateBox/LibraryBox in the background.

In my opinion it is amazing how the LibraryBox-project develops, which is mostly the result of a very consequent and persistent work of Jason Griffey.

With this grant the LibraryBox project targets the release version 2.1 including the following new features:

Multi-language support of the GUI
Clean and easier upgrade path
More responsive design at the directory listing
RaspberryPi support

I’m glad to support Jason with some development work to get the version 2.1 ready to run.

bisQuITbox @ FSCONS'13

2013-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

Last month I visited an open source conference named “FSCONS”. The name is short for “Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit” and it took place in Göteborg from November 8-10.

I gave a talk about the PirateBox project and received some nice feedback about the project..

As well, I visited interesting talks and discussions about other free software like owncloud. The owncloud talk was given by the founder of the project (Frank Karlitschek).

And later, I was able to get a sneak preview of the mailpile software which was funded with indigogo.

It was a totally mind opening event. Thank you FSCONS team!

PirateBoxCamp 2013 took place in Berlin

2013-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

We are proud to be part of the PirateBox community. We sponsored five TP-Link MR3020 and USB-Sticks that the audience was able to build their own PirateBox.

One of our visitors and community members created that awesome video about the camp.

PirateboxCamp 2013 - Berlin from Augustin Delaporte on Vimeo.

More pictures can be found on PirateBox.cc - Camp pictures.

Pictures are licenced under CC-3.0 share alike, taken from piratebox.cc

LibraryBox Kickstarter success

2013-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

A friend of me, Jason Griffey, created a very successful Kickstarter campain to fund further development of his project called LibraryBox.

LibraryBox is a //less provocative// fork of the PirateBox project, that does not allow uploads to the device. Jason’s roots are libraries and he promotes the devices as a utility to spread free eBooks or other material.

Learn more about the use cases of the LibraryBox project.

The logo above is licenced under Creative Commons Licensed NC-BY by Jason Griffey

OFFLINE ART : new2

2013-03-01T00:00:00+00:00

OFFLINE ART is “net art” project designed to distribute this kind of art into galleries. Up to the release of the OFFLINE ART project, it was only possible to see web- and net-art projects in Internet-cafés or your computer at home. With this project and the tiny device it utilizes, everything changes - for the artist even for the vistor.

We provided technical assistance for Aram Bartholl and tried to create a modified OpenWrt software, which makes the customization //as easy as possible// for the artist. All relevant configuration whas moved to text-files on an attached USB Stick including the artistic computerfiles, i.e. pictures, videos, text-files…

By using the USB Stick, the artist can place art and configure the hardware within a couple of minutes. Every artist got a pre-prepared device, including the customized OFFLINE ART firmware. After booting up the tiny router, a wifi network appears, which the artist has the option to name. In this first exhibition, each wifi network was based on the art it included.

Every visitor was able to see a list of presenting artists through their smartphone, and was able to see the art with his own device at the gallery - without requiring a normal computer.

Further links about the project:

Aram Bartholl’s project page
Github Source Repository
« Offline Art », il faut savoir réseaux garder ~ par Marie Lechner, Libération, vendredi 1er mars 2013

It is possible to order pre-installed OFFLINEART-devices, please contact us under office(at)bisquitbox.de

The pictures at this page are owned by Aram Bartholl and are licenced under [Creative Commons license by-nc-sa 3.0] (HTTP://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/).