Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver...

Posted Mar 24, 2009 0:14 UTC (Tue) by pabs (subscriber, #43278)
In reply to: Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver... by endecotp
Parent article: Williams: That's when I reach for my revolver...

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] (2 responses)

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 (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses)

> 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.