Long term DSL stats, despite FritzOS 5/6

Last night, a few hours late for a perfect start aligned with the new year, I finally fixed my data gathering scripts that were broken due to AVM rearranging things destructively in minor releases.

When I decided to give FritzOS 5.50+ a try on my 7360 about 12 weeks ago, I didn’t directly realize that this did break my data gathering scripts that were working nicely for all of my 4.xx releases of the FritzBox firmware, and for 5.22, the version my 7360 ran with back then, as well.

Since I only check my graphs in case of issues, I didn’t realized until recently that AVM did break this as well. I could have guessed, as AVM broke WiFi compatibility to previous firmwares with 5.50 as well, but, well, I frankly didn’t check. It was supposed to be a minor upgrade (x.22 to x.50) …

It took me some time, much more than anticipated, but in the end I was able gather some knowledge about the changes introduced by AVM.
Basically, AVM changed: (1) the login procedure, it uses new URLs and in general stuff is not addressed via webcm-related links anymore (see this IPPF post and/or this blog post for details); (2) query.txt does not exist anymore, it was replaced by query.lua and now returns JSON formatted data (see this article for details).

My script is now trying to auto-detect the new login scheme and uses the FritzOS 5 methods, if the Fritz firmware 4 ones do not work. This works so far for my 7570s (with xx.04.90/91) as well as the 7360 (with xx.06.01 already). Well, it should work at least until AVM decides to break external scripts again in in upcoming release … :(