Re: GSM modem via Bluetooth?

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Thu, 2011-01-06 at 13:16 -0600, Dan Williams wrote:
<snip>
> I spend some time on this over the holidays to figure out what it would
> take for manually started rfcomm ports to show up as Bluetooth modems
> and be configurable without the BT wizard.

You'll still need to pair the device at some point anyway.

>   The short answer is that
> yes, this is possible, though it's somewhat icky.  But even if NM
> exported the device as a Bluetooth modem, you'll still need connection
> details (APN, username, password) before you can ask NM to connect the
> device.

Exactly.

> I'll look into further cleaning up the proof-of-concept patches I did
> and see if they can be merged in some form in the near future.

I think that this is probably best left alone until someone implements
Bluetooth line discipline in pppd and the Linux kernel directly, so that
reliance on rfcomm, or creation of "serial ports" through bluetoothd is
unneeded.

If you want to be able to use the /dev/rfcomm devices directly, I'd
recommend making this "hard" to setup, so that people don't try and use
it as the main way to create a connection to their device, rather as a
debugging method (wrong Bluetooth port used for example).

Creating an rfcomm device, making sure it stays across reboots, and
making sure it points to the right port (which has absolutely no
guarantees of staying the same across enabling/disabling the feature on
the device), is a sure way to break things, and requires root access.