Re: 3G USB support for NM 0.7.0

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Wed, 2009-12-23 at 19:54 -0500, Keith Smith wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>    I am trying to get my Sierra Wireless 598 CDMA USB modem to work.
> I am running Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy) which came preloaded on Dell mini
> Inspiron 1210 (like a netbook)
> I cannot (easily) upgrade the kernel or distro due to custom Dell
> hardware kernel drivers (WiFi driver "wl" is proprietary).
> I am using dual boot (DOS/XP/Ubuntu) with GRUB 1.0 in the MBR, don't
> want to upgrade to GRUB2 (comes with Ubuntu 8.10) since I have a
> working freedos bootable USB drive with GRUB1 for dos installer (just
> in case).
> I believe that Ubunutu 9.x fully supports the Sierra Wireless 598 out
> of the box... cannot upgrade as stated above.

So you might have some problems there; Ubuntu doesn't usually update
software in their stable versions, preferring to backport patches.  And
of course 8.04 is pretty old now, so it's unlikely to receive a ton of
attention.

NetworkManager 0.7.2 and 0.8 work quite a lot better with modems than
what got shipped in Ubuntu 8.04, but it may not be possible to build
0.7.2 on your system.

> I have upgraded to the latest released Network Manager 0.7.0 and
> Modem Manager 0.0+20081126t163712.bf522e3.mbm.f2-0ubuntu2
> using apt-get etc.
> I have downloaded, compiled and installed the latest Sierra Wireless
> driver (v.1.7.8) for my kernel (2.6.24)
> 
> USB connects fine on Windows XP computer, device is activated.
> Kernel: 2.6.24-22-lpia
> 
> I am able to connect to internet using the following:
> 
> 1) plug into any USB slot, kernel detects device, ignores tru-install
> 
> 2) I run usb_modeswitch to change from "mass storage" to "modem"
>    kernel then detects it is Sierra Modem (dmesg)
>    /ttyUSB0 to /ttyUSB4 devices are available
> 3) wvdial into /dev/ttuUSB0
> 4) pppd
> 5) manually adding required routes to routing table (local IP, remote
> IP, and gateway)
> 6) manually adding DNS entries in /etc/resolve.conf
> 
>   I can script items 1 to 4, but have trouble with 5 and 6 because
> Network manager will overwrite them...
> 
>   Now I understand there is a plug-in mechanism to add USB BroadBand
> Mobile devices to network manager, by copying existing examples...I
> will need help to find and configure them...
> 
>   Since the kernel does not detect the USB modem without sending
> usb_modeswitch... is there any hope to getting network manager to work
> with a D-Bus signal/message?

We'd need some logs from NetworkManager (and I guess modem-manager) in
that case to figure out what's going on.  The version of NM/MM shipped
in 8.04 is pretty diverged from upstream as Ubuntu did some heavy
customization on it, but it might be possible to figure out what's going
on.  First off, you'll want to make sure that modem-manager is actually
finding the modem.  I think even in that older version of MM you can run
MM with "--debug" to get more information out of it.

That version of NM/MM used HAL .fdi files to identify devices, so if the
device isn't also listed in the .fdi files NM/MM won't be able to see
it.  Check that first; use dpkg -L to get a list of the files in the
NetworkManager and ModemManager packages and see if anything is
under /usr/share/hal/.  Then poke around there and see if adding the USB
IDs for your Sierra device helps.  Be careful to only tag ports that
actually are AT-capable serial ports with IS-707-A.  Let me know how it
goes.

Dan