I’ve tried on and off for a while to figure out how the use my GSM/HSPA cell phones as a dial up modem, and I was never able to find a decent tutorial online that would walk me through the steps.

Everything that I read in the Ubuntu forums, as well as elsewhere simply said “it worked out of the box for me, are you stupid that you cannot get it to work?” with no explanation at all as to the steps that were taken to get there.

The level of frustration reached it’s peak when I had a customer call me, because he had a need for a Rocket Stick, but it had to work on an HP Mini 1100 Netbook, that was running an HP customized distribution of Ubuntu Linux.

Being the optimist that I am, I told him that I could get it up and running for him no problem, and that I would even deliver the hardware and handle the software set up for him (he’s currently hospitalized, and I’m a chump). I figured it would take about 20 minutes of tinkering at home, and then I would be ready to go.

I got home, plugged the Stick into my laptop, right clicked on the Network Manager icon in my task bar and went to “Edit Connections” Once I got there, it was a very simply little wizard that would allow me to choose the country I live in (Canada) and then my service provider (Rogers Wireless). Simple, easy, and ready to go. Right?

Wrong.

The problem is, once you have configured the settings through Network Manager, there is no obvious indication of how to actually use the connection. There is no “Start” button. There was no indication at all of how to get the connection up and running. It turns out, to the best of my knowledge that this is a largely useless step, as you don’t even need to set anything up there at all. The good part, is it put the settings in front of you, so that you didn’t have to google them. These settings, actually get used in a PPP dial out program, I chose gnome-ppp. Off to install gnome-ppp, and away you go…if only it was so easy.

Getting gnome-ppp to dial out was a piece of cake, provided that I dialed out as root. There was no way that I could find to set the permissions properly to let a normal user dial out. After a bit of though, I actually came to the conclusion that this was a benefit to me, because someone would have to know my password to use my connection if they found my laptop, so it is something that I can live with. Strangely, I noticed after playing with it a little bit more, that once the root user had dialed out, any user who was part of the dialout group could dial, it just seemed for some reason that root had to dial first. If I try to dial out as myself, I am told that the device is busy. How…odd.

Edit: I discovered earlier today that the Network Manager Applet is indeed able to handle the connection for you, and you do not need to dial out using gnome-ppp. I was unable to see how to set the connection due to the roughly 100+ Wi-Fi access points that with in range of my apartment. Once you add the choose the connection, it will ask you to add the device to your keyring, and you are good to go, as any user.

Once I got this all sorted out, I delivered the hardware to my customer, installed gnome-ppp onto his machine, and we were up and running before you knew it.

Steps to Dial out, in order…

• Insert the Rocket Stick into your USB port.
• Unmount the USB key that contains the Windows Software, you do not need it.
• Right click on the network-manager applet, and choose “Edit Connections”
• Click on the Mobile Broadband tab, and add a connection as appropriate to your GSM carrier. Write all of these settings down. You will need them later.
• If it is not installed, install gnome-ppp. I imagine there is a KDE equivalent out there for you KDE users. It should work just as well.
• As root, run gnome-ppp.
  • Click on the Setup Button
  • Click the Detect Modem Button
  • Use the modem as detected. Mine was detected out of the box, but leaving the setting for Modem Type as Analog Modem, do not change it to USB. More on this later.
  • In the Options tab, I set mine to dock to the notification area when connected.
  • Copy the settings you wrote down earlier, to the dial out screen of gnome-ppp
  • Settings
    Rogers Wireless
    Username : wapuser1
    Password : wap
    Phone Number : *99#

    Fido / Microcell
    Username : fido
    Password : fido
    Phone Number : *99#

  • Hit the Connect Button, and enjoy 3G bliss…

When I got home, I decided to see what other pieces of hardware that I had at home, that I would be able to use in the same fashion.

So far, my Nokia e71i, RIM Blackberry 8120, and Nokia 5310 have all worked perfectly. A couple of the settings were a little bit different, and with the Nokia’s, you strangely have to put them into “PC Suite Mode” instead of “Connect PC to web”. It worked like a charm though.

This was all actually so easy to set up once I wrapped my head around using it as a Dial Up Modem (Who know broadband dial up existed? Not me!), that I started to look for some other ways of connecting, primarily using Bluetooth.

My Nokia e71i, also works flawlessly as a modem over a Bluetooth connection as well, if you use the instructions I found in a Blog via a google search

I’ve actually taken a couple of his steps and automated them with a simple shell script that I put into my ~/bin/ called “bt-dialer”


dan@sober: ~
$ cat bin/bt-dialout
#!/bin/bash

sudo rfcomm bind /dev/rfcomm0 00:21:FE:D5:1D:48 4

sudo gnome-ppp &

This script sets everything up for me, and dials out for me, all automagically.

You do have to double check every couple of times to make sure that your phone is still on the same Bluetooth channel. Mine changed for some random reason last night, and everything broke until I pair deleted all Bluetooth pairings on both the phone and the PC, as well as rebooted the phone. When I rebooted, I reran the steps from start to finish, to find out the phone was on Channel 2 now, instead of Channel 4. Not the end of the world, but definitely a pain in the ass.

Next step? Write a couple of switches into the script so that I can tell it what phone I happen to have with me at that moment in time.

It’s gonna be slick.

Filed under: Hardware, Hobbies, Linux, Software, The Web, Wireless by dan