Re: Problems with UMTS modems and weak signal

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-04-15 at 22:13 +0200, Martin Bammer wrote:
> When I connect to the internet with a UMTS modem (Huawei E156G) I have
> problems with the connection when signal is sometimes to weak (e.g. when
> travelling with a train).
> When signal is too weak the connection gets lost. (Thats normal and ok).
> But when signal strength is strong enough again to reconnect network
> manager does nothing. It should automatically reconnect like it does
> with wireless connections.

Yes, this is a bug that we do need to fix.

> Second problem is that I also can't reconnect manually. When connection
> gets lost the "Disconnect" menu entry disappears. So I only can click on
> the menu entry with the name of the network provider. But when I click
> on it nothing happens. The expected reaction of nm should be to
> reconnect. What I have to do to be able to reconnect is to unplug the
> umts modem, replugin it again and click on the network provider menu
> entry to reconnect. That's very uncomfortable.
> Is there a way to solve this problem?

What version of NetworkManager are you using?  There are additional
things we can do to debug this issue as well.  Grabbing some logs
from /var/log/messages (or /var/log/NetworkManager.log,
or /var/log/daemon.log depending on your distro) would help to diagnose
this problem.

Dan