Re: 3G USB support for NM 0.7.0

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2009-12-29 at 16:10 -0500, Keith Smith wrote:
> Hello!
> 
>   Great info, ok I have the modem showing up in Network Manager under
> the "Mobile BroadBand" section
> (only after sending the "usb_modeswitch" to change to the VID 0x1199
> and PID 0x0025 )
> 
>   I then tried disabling my WiFi routers and selecting the CDMA
> device... however it fails to "activate" see attached debug logs...
> 
>   interesting <info> message is Network Manager detects that /ttyUSB0
> is CDMA device from 'sierra' ..... looks like a good start....

The "device is connected" problem was fixed recently in ModemManager
git.  You'll want to get a newer version of MM or ask your distro to
update it.  Specifically, I believe that something forgot to set the
serial port "connected" flag back to FALSE when the device was disabled
or disconnected.

Dan

>   ok looks like the broadcom "wl" drivers will be ready in distro
> 10.04... right now the only thing going for this netbook is that the
> WiFi is working very well, so potentially having that fail in 9.x is
> too much risk for the moment... :-(
> 
>   BTW, I added a DNSsuperseed of OpenDNS to make sure that
> resolve.conf always has at least 1 OpenDNS entry.  Then the only
> thing left to configure is the routing tables... which come from pppd
> in command line....
> 
> Thanks for any/all help you can provide!
> K
> 
> On Fri, Dec 25, 2009 at 3:29 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> > 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
> >
> >
> >