MavEtJu's Distorted View of the World - 2009-04
Train evacuation due a sick passenger
FreeBSD and the Huawei E169 USB 3G Modem - Step two FreeBSD and the Huawei E169 USB 3G Modem - Step one Back to index Train evacuation due a sick passengerPosted on 2009-04-29 08:00:00 Last night when travelling home on the train, we got a message over the intercom saying that the train wouldn't go further than Kogarah because of a sick passenger. Eight carriages, two floors each, 50+ passengers per floor (nine rows of five passengers each, plus standing), that makes 800+ people who had to get out and being distributed over other trains. When a car brakes down on the Sydney Harbour bridge, or in one of the many tunnels, you are supposed to stay in the car until somebody comes with a pickup truck which will get your car and you away from the bridge or tunnel so that the traffic can keep flowing and that it causes the least delay. Of the 800 people, about 600 of them had to walk past the sick man, who was laying on the platform and surrounded by at small yellow fence (good idea) and four people with yellow and orange vests, which makes me believe that they were people who understood what was going on. On the way to the other platform I saw two ambulance medics with a stretcher coming down via a lift to the platform, so all went smooth from that side too. The next two trains going in the direction I wanted to go to were already packed when they arrived at the station (remember this is peak hour) and even more packed when they left the station. When I finally got on the third train, about half an hour after we were told to leave the train, the abandonned train was still standing on the platform. That really makes me wonder why the policy of Cityrail with regarding to injured passengers is to abandon the train and get everybody to change to, during peak hours, already packed trains. Getting the injured person of the train, in the capable hands of the station personel (oh oh, but Kogarah is a big station) so that the delay for the 800 other people is minimized. Also, he will be spared from the 800 people walking past him who, while he is laying inmobilized on the floor, silently blame him for the delay. Show comment | Share on Facebook | Share on Twitter FreeBSD and the Huawei E169 USB 3G Modem - Step twoPosted on 2009-04-27 21:00:00 The story so far... An upgrade to FreeBSD 7.2, X not working, something goes wrong in the IPCP layer, a non-working MacOS/X upgrade and in need of a firmware upgrade. When I put the E169 in the first Windows machine I found, it kind of died a horrible way: it kept telling me that it had found new hardware and when I was lucky enough, I managed to run it before it decided that it had found new hardware again. Flashing it to a new firmware version was a little bit optimistic for that machine! Today I took it the E169 modem with me to work and during lunch I put it in a Windows machine there. It installed without an itch, it connected to the Virgin network and it downloaded at a wopping speed of 150 kbps. Now why did it work there and how did it achieve it? I found a program called Advanced Serial Port Monitor which kind of puts itself between the Windows COM port drive and the Windows kernel and displays what is being said between the client and the hardware. The client program said "AT+CGMM?" and the modem said "E169". The client program said "AT^CARDLOCK?" and the modem said "^CARDLOCK: 2,10,0" (any idea?). The client program said "AT+CIMI" and the modem said "5050299062636465". And the client program said "AT+COPS?" and the modem said "+COPS: 1,0,"YES OPTUS",2". And a lot of other AT commands were issued, but unfortunately the client program didn't want to dial out while the monitor was running... Unfortunately, none of the AT commands helped me from getting a proper CONNECT string (CONNECT 7200000 was the one I was looking for) and getting the IPCP part of the PPP initialisation working. None of this helped. I kept looking and looking and suddenly I saw this one being executed instead of the "YES OPTUS" one: "AT+COPS=1,2,"50502",2". It didn't make much sense, but never tried is always miss. And I ended up with a CONNECT 7200000 and a full PPP handshake session. Bingo! So, at the end, we ended up with the following configuration on the modem (just in case it differs from yours and it doesn't work): and the following ppp.conf:ati Manufacturer: huawei Model: E169 Revision: 11.314.17.00.261 IMEI: 351029385479124 +GCAP: +CGSM,+DS,+ES at&v &C: 2; &D: 2; &E: 0; &F: 0; &S: 0; &W: 0; E: 1; L: 0; M: 0; Q: 0; V: 1; X: 0; Z: 0; \Q: 3; \S: 0; \V: 0; S0: 0; S2: 43; S3: 13; S4: 10; S5: 8; S6: 2; S7: 50; S8: 2; S9: 6; S10: 14; S11: 95; S30: 0; S103: 1; S104: 1; +FCLASS: 0; +ICF: 3,3; +IFC: 2,2; +IPR: 115200; +DR: 0; +DS: 0,0,2048,6; +WS46: 12; +CBST: 0,0,1; +CRLP: (61,61,48,6,0),(61,61,48,6,1),(240,240,52,6,2); +CV120: 1,1,1,0,0,0; +CHSN: 0,0,0,0; +CSSN: 0,0; +CREG: 0; +CGREG: 0; +CFUN:; +CSCS: "IRA"; +CSTA: 129; +CR: 0; +CRC: 0; +CMEE: 2; +CGDCONT: (1,"IP","VirginBroadband","0.0.0.0",0,0) ; +CGDSCONT: ; +CGTFT: ; +CGEQREQ: (1,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(2,2,0,0, 0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(3,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(4,2,0,0,0,0,2,0, "0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(5,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(6,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0 E0",3,0,0),(7,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(8,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0, 0),(9,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(10,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(11, 2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(12,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(13,2,0,0, 0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(14,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(15,2,0,0,0,0,2, 0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0),(16,2,0,0,0,0,2,0,"0E0","0E0",3,0,0) ; +CGEQMIN: ; +CGQREQ: ; +CGQMIN: ; ; +CGEREP: 0,0; +CGCLASS: "B"; +CGSMS: 1; +CSMS: 0; +CMGF: 0; +CSAS: 0; +CRES: 0; +CSCA: "+61411990010",145; +CSMP: ,,0,0; +CSDH: 0; +CSCB: 0,"",""; +FDD: 0; +FAR: 0; +FCL: 0; +FIT: 0,0; +ES: ,,; +ESA: 0,,,,0,0,255,; +CMOD: 0; +CVHU: 1; ; +CPIN: , ; +CMEC: 0,0,0; +CKPD: 1,1; +CGATT: 1; +CGACT: 0; +CPBS: "SM"; +CPMS: "SM","SM","SM"; +CNMI: 0,0,0,0,0; +CMMS: 2; +FTS: 0; +FRS: 0; +FTH: 3; +FRH: 3; +FTM: 96; +FRM: 96; +CCUG: 0,0,0; +COPS: 1,0,""; +CUSD: 0; +CAOC: 1; +CCWA: 0; +CCLK: ""; +CLVL: 4; +CMUT: 0; +CPOL: 0,2,"",0,0,0; +CPLS: 0; +CTZR: 0; +CTZU: 0; +CLIP: 0; +COLP: 0; +CDIP: 0; +CLIR: 0; ^PORTSEL: 0; ^CPIN: , ; ^ATRECORD: 0; ^FREQLOCK: 12805096,13050984; ^CVOICE: 0; ^DDSETEX: 0
This only brings up the issue with X: Starting X with the E169 modem
plugged in did make it start the X graphical screen but it failed
to start the window manager and the mouse was unresponsive. Taking
out the modem resulted in going back to the console.
I got a hint from Callum on #bugs that I should try x11-servers/xorg-server without hald support. A recompile later and X and the mouse works with the modem plugged in, but the keyboard didn't work yet. Adding these four lines to my xorg.conf overcame the problem: Short version: The E169 modem works with FreeBSD 7.2 out of the box, Xorg 7.4 works with four extra lines in the config, the XFCE window manager works, everybody is happy! Show 4 comments | Share on Facebook | Share on Twitter FreeBSD and the Huawei E169 USB 3G Modem - Step onePosted on 2009-04-25 19:00:00 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! Show comment | Share on Facebook | Share on Twitter |