Re: Franklin Wireless u770 and other modems with a web-ui

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Tue, 2013-03-05 at 13:29 -0500, Shawn J. Goff wrote:
> I have a Franklin Wireless u770 modem here that ModemManager doesn't
> know how to deal with. Its configuration is all done through a web
> interface. Is there any interest or existing effort to get ModemManager
> to handle this type?

It depends on the functionality of the device and how far we'd go to try
to shoehorn it into the MM model.  If all the webui really supports is
signal strength, operator, and registration, then perhaps it's not worth
supporting.

We already want to handle "upstream provider" information in
NetworkManager for interfaces that look like etherent (eg, iPhone
tethering which reports signal strength and stuff via mDNS) but clearly
are WWAN.  These aren't suitable to be handled by ModemManager because
there simply isn't a reason to; most of the MM dbus interface would be
useless, and in the end, they don't need any kind of control.

Perhaps the best way to support these devices (as long as they don't
need any extensive) is like the iPhone; since they are usable
immediately after plugging in just like ethernet is, we just handle them
like ethernet devices and then have small helpers that scrape the HTML
for "upstream provider" information like signal strength, operator name,
roaming/not roaming, etc, and have NetworkManager export a D-Bus
interface for that info that GUI applets can use.

Dan