Re: ZTE MF100 Mobile broadband failure

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Thu, 2012-06-14 at 10:17 +0100, Richard Hughes wrote:
> On 13 June 2012 22:50, Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com> wrote:
> > Looks like the CS registration state is "Denied".  Is the SIM still
> > active?
> 
> I've not used the dongle since 2010, so it's entirely possible that
> it's been disabled due to inactivity. Sticking the SIM from the dongle
> into my phone shows the network list, although registering gives me
> "Your SIM does not allow a connection to this network". Calling 02
> (the network provider) they confirmed that the SIM was deactivated due
> to not being used for 3 months.
> 
> The question I guess then becomes how to notify the user of this,
> without just silently failing with no error message?

ModemManager does provide the necessary info (ie, registration denied
state) but the UI tools don't yet use that.  What we'd want to do in the
shell UI and the applet is detect that state and then somehow disable
connections for that network.  The problem is, that you can have
connections that force-register the modem with a different network too,
and that could definitely work even if the autoregistration fails.  So
we can't just disable the device.

So we probably need to:

1) show that status in the network menu; the shell looks for
RegistrationInfo but it only cares about the operator name, apparently.
We need to look at the 'status' item in that response in modemManager.js
and convert that into a string to display in the UI.  The values for
'status' are:

    MM_MODEM_GSM_NETWORK_REG_STATUS_IDLE = 0,
    MM_MODEM_GSM_NETWORK_REG_STATUS_HOME = 1,
    MM_MODEM_GSM_NETWORK_REG_STATUS_SEARCHING = 2,
    MM_MODEM_GSM_NETWORK_REG_STATUS_DENIED = 3,
    MM_MODEM_GSM_NETWORK_REG_STATUS_UNKNOWN = 4,
    MM_MODEM_GSM_NETWORK_REG_STATUS_ROAMING = 5,

nm-applet puts the status into a 'status' menu item right below the
device name, near the signal strength display.  We didn't copy that
functionality for the shell.

2) if the registration state is denied, that means the currently
registered network won't serve you, and we need to gray out connections
that have the same MCC/MNC (the network-id property in the GSM setting).
You don't usually specify an MCC/MNC in a connection, which means most
connection's MCC/MNC will still be blank, and what we don't have is a
method yet of determining whether the modem is autoregistered or
force-registered.  We have that information in ModemManager, but it's
not exported in any way yet.

Basically, we have to ask ourselves what actions the user should take to
fix things if they get registration denied.  They could put another SIM
in, they could force register with another network by picking that
connection from the menu, or they can just unplug the device.

Dan