Posted on 2009-04-25 19:00:00
Tags: Huawei E169, FreeBSD, Networking, 3G
Earlier this century I had a Huawei E220 USB 3G modem in my possession and believe it or not, after some fiddling and hacking I got it working under FreeBSD 6.x. (Un)fortunately I quit my job and had to give it back.
Overtime it got more and more difficult to find 3G provide who offered a E220 and I had given up on ever running 3G on my FreeBSD laptop again until I saw a commit of Poul-Henning Kamp which said "Make the ubsa(4) work with Huawei Exxx (tested with E169) 3G radio devices".
It took me still quiet a couple of months before I dared to go looking for a replacement and last week I found out that Virgin shop was the only 3G provider who could tell me from their head which brand and model USB modem they provided. And it was a Huawei E169! Life would be sweet again!
Luckily the commit by Poul wasn't too big and I was able to backport it to the 7.1 release running on my laptop and oh boy... It didn't really work yet. For some reason it did the same as my previous modem did before:
It still didn't finish the IPCP layer! I checked the APN, which is VirginBroadband. And I remembered what I did last time: I had to put it in a Windows machien before it worked. I still don't understand this, but okay.$ ppp virgin ppp> dial Ppp> PPp>
Stopping the PPP program caused a kernel panic. Rebooting the machine without stopping the PPP program caused a kernel panic. Starting X while the USB modem was in caused in a hanging X. Putting the USB modem in while X was running caused a hanging keyboard. Fsck was very upset with me, every time.
So, later I found a commit of Nick Hibma which said "Say hello to the u3g driver, implementing support for 3G modems." plus a bunch of follow-up commits with fixes. And, it was backported into RELENG_7! So I upgraded my laptop to 7.2 (RC1 or something) and rebooted.... It didn't recognize the USB modem at the first attempt, but when I loaded the u3g.ko kernel module it recognized both the modem and the disk part of it! No more patches, it is all vanilla 7.2.
But for some reason it did the same as my previous attempt did before:
That kind of euhm... sucks bigtime.$ ppp virgin ppp> dial Ppp> PPp>
I don't have a Windows machine, but I do have access a MacOSX machine which should be supported out of the box! The USB modem goes into the MacOSX machine, the software gets installed and I click on the "Connect" button. It says "Connecting" and it comes back with "Connection failed". Euhm...
Looking further, it seems that the program SetNetworkConfig gets called when you press the Connect button and it crashes. At least it gives me some kind of hint where to go next: I need to get newer software, either from Huawei E169 download page or from Virgin Broadband website. The installer of this puts the new software runs on the USB modem and for some reason it only works on a Windows machines.
So tomorrow I'm going to find me a Windows machine, put the USB modem in it, see if it works with Virgin 3G, then see if it then works on my FreeBSD machine, if not then upgrade the software first, see if it still works on the Windows machine and then see if it gets to work on the FreeBSD machine.
Lots of adventures are pending!
| Share on Facebook | Share on Twitter| From: | Edwin Groothuis |
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| Posted on: | 2009-04-28 07:03:13 |
| Comment | To automatically load the u3g.ko driver, add this to your /boot/loader.conf:
u3g_load="YES" |
| Reply | - |