Re: GSM dongle fails to connect

[Radu Rendec <radu rendec cloudbit ro>]

Hi Aleksander,

Thanks for the input! Please see my comments below.

On Tue, 2012-11-06 at 19:40 +0100, Aleksander Morgado wrote:
> Which modem is this? If it's a Huawei modem, your issue may be known
> (wrong tty used for data).

It is Huawei (initial vid/pid 12d1:1c0b, then switched to 12d1:1c08 by
usb_modeswitch). But the thing is that the driver exposes 2 ttys, and
both of them respond. I successfully connected with screen directly and
sent some AT commands and got back the response.

I know that ModemManager tries to do auto detection - because usually
only one tty should respond and probably ModemManager relies on this for
detecting the "valid" tty. Given the fact that both ttys respond, I have
no idea how one of them is picked as "good".

> >       * on the new system, Mobile Broadband is disabled by default; if I
> >         enable it, I can see an "orange UMTS" entry in the
> >         active/available connections list. It shows a signal strength
> >         icon, but the list entry is grayed out.
> 
> That's the information about the current network where the modem is
> registered, and the user is not supposed to click on it. You're not the
> only one confused about this:
> https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=658230

Thanks for the link. I read the bug comments and it makes much more
sense now. Given the discussions, I guess this will be changed in a
future release.

> Your modem has probably different PDP contexts configured (APNs, IP
> type...), ModemManager will try to activate the PDP context
> corresponding to the settings you passed, the one with CID=2 in your
> case. Nothing to worry about here, unless you're really passing the
> wrong APN in the settings.

The APN is "internet" (I think this is the default for most providers)
and it's the correct setting. However, I've just double checked this on
the provider's page ( http://www.orange.ro/services/internet.html ) and
I'm a little bit confused about the "phone number" setting. This is what
they say on their page:

    APN (Access Point Name): "internet"
    number call: *99# or *99***1# (depending on the telephone type)
    proxy server: 172.22.7.20
    port: 80
    user name: blank
    password: blank
    modem initialization commands:
        at+cgdcont=1,”ip”,”internet”,””,0,0
        at+cgdcont=1,”ip”,”internet”

So maybe CID=2 is actually wrong, but the APN setting is correct.

> I would try to grab both ModemManager and NetworkManager debug logs. See
> the "Debugging NetworkManager 0.8 and 0.9 3G connections" section at
> https://live.gnome.org/NetworkManager/Debugging.

Thanks! I had done that already, but I'm not sure about the mailing list
policy. Is it ok to post back on the list and include it as an
attachment? It's around 60k (or 7k if I gzip it).

Thanks,

Radu