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Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver...Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver...Posted Mar 23, 2009 23:37 UTC (Mon) by endecotp (guest, #36428)Parent article: Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver...
Very timely for me. My cable connection got flaky at the weekend (277 bytes per second!) and I realised how much I depend on it for important stuff, like earning enough to pay the rent. So I was considering getting a 3G gadget of some sort for emergency use. There are two challenges; Dan's article describes one, and the other other, which I think is just as daunting, it deciphering what they cost.
The article is about getting these things to work with network manager. But in my scenario I would want to plug it in to something like my NSLU2 or even my OpenWRT router to provide connectivity for the whole LAN. My NSLU2 isn't going to be running the GUI network manager app: I would need to be able to configure the thing at the "ifconfig" level. I do hope that they aren't putting too much of the support for these things at too high a level.
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Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 0:14 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]
In 0.7 there are command-line clients for NM and the GUI is separate from the network management daemon.
NM isn't the only network management solution in town, there are at least wicd & connman.
Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 0:43 UTC (Tue) by sbdep (subscriber, #13282) [Link]
My experience trying to get 3G type of data cards to work,is that they are usually configured through pppd. So appropriate configurations of a named ppp peer with appropriate initstring/chatscripts to configure the data card itself, and you should be able to configure the connection to integrate into your distributions normal network management tools, and ignore NetworkManager.
Depending on the card, it usually takes a udev rule to prod the card/dongle to switch from USB mass storage to usb modem mode (for USB dongle devices that need this prodding), then a ppp peer config and a chatscript to tell the card to initialize and connect to the network, then "dial" the magic number to get a data connection.
Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 1:47 UTC (Tue) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
> My experience trying to get 3G type of data cards to work,is that they are usually configured through pppd.
Well you see that's the problem. That is not really true. It never really was, but it is rapidly getting less and less true.
Like the blog says you can have different interfaces for each card and often you can have multiple serial devices, 3 or more, for configuring a card. The pppd tools are not really capable of configuring them correctly.
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Take, for example, my Sony 3G phone. I can configure it using pppd and use it like that, but that is essentially 'gimp legacy mode'. The thing sets up a virtual ethernet port over USB and that is what is actually suppose to be used. What is suppose to happen is that the OS sends configuration stuff over one of the serial connections and then you connect through the usb-ethernet adapter.
The reason they are doing this is because PPP has too much overhead and it will choke out over USB before the user can get high speed internet access.
Plus I expect there are all sorts of extra settings that you miss out on just using regular pppd and scripts.
So if you were to benchmark the network performance of Linux vs Windows over celular data networks you'll find that Linux is usually slower, has more reliability issues, and tends to have higher latency.
Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 10:14 UTC (Tue) by dcbw (guest, #50562) [Link]
Yeah, 'hso' cards, newer Sierra or Huawei cards, and Ericsson F3507g/MD300/Dell 5530 just wouldn't work with pppd, because they don't use ppp. You'd have to run wvdial with the AT commands to set the APN and the rest of the config, then have wvdial somehow parse the AT_OWANDATA response on 'hso' cards to get the IP address and DNS servers (or run DHCP on Ericsson cards) and then have wvdial set up the IP interface and your /etc/resolv.conf and whatever. Seems like something wvdial wasn't really written for.
Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... Posted Mar 24, 2009 0:52 UTC (Tue) by camh (guest, #289) [Link]
I am using a Huawei E169 USB 3G modem on my linux box. I configured it with just pppd and chat. To activate the connection it is a simple matter of starting pppd.
The E169 uses the "option" driver in the kernel. Earlier kernels (maybe about 2.6.26 and earlier) need the usb_modeswitch utility to switch the USB stick from a "CDROM" with drivers to the actual modem. In the later kernels, the "option" driver does this automatically.
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