Ubuntu and Mobile Broadband Access

[Mick_L]

Time to call in a favour 

This one has me a little stumped so it's over to Mr RG for a little advice

I have a work Levono laptop, bottom of the range model, but useful for keeping in contact while away on trips. Over the years, I have successfully been able to tether a mobile phone to it for internet access.

Recently, I upgraded it to Ubuntu 9.10, and the tethering between it and the WinMobile based phone stopped working - I was using usb_rndis_lite driver with the previous 9.04. A couple of 'fixes' have been suggested in the Ubuntu forums, but they don't seem to work in this case.

Anyway I remember reading about an app that could turn your phone into a wireless hotspot, and also hear that our own RG also uses this method of tethering. After poking around the interwebs a bit, I settled on a commercial program called WMWifiRouter. I fired this up and got it connected to an eeepc netbook no problems. The eeepc was the guinea pig because it is my geek tool of choice for an upcoming bike ride in Victoria. eeepc runs Ubuntu netbook remix 9.04

Satisfied with the excellence of the product, my attention turned to getting the work laptop connected. Of course it just won't happen. The phone will connect to every other computer in the house, and a friends iPhone. It will even connect to the laptop in question if I boot the Windoze OS (to be avoided)

So what I am after is some ideas where to look to sort this.
The machine in question is running Ubuntu 9.10 - other ubuntu machines that have successfully negotiated a connection were 9.04 versions.  My machine can see the connection, and recognise the simple WEP security. I have even tried to connect with security disabled. When a connection is attempted, you get the animated spinning atomy bally things and after a certain timeout period, you are invited to re-enter the security password. It doesn't actually fail or report that it cannot connect. So it must be really close.

Settings on the phone are: ad-hoc, channel 1 wireless, channel 1 security, default IP is 192.168.3.x - I have even attempted 192.168.2.x (I'll try a .0.x or .1.x perhaps but at risk of conflicting with the home wireless set up) but in view of the fact that this will connect up to pretty well every thing else wifi, I wonder if there is some ubuntu driver I need to view with some suspicion.

Over to you Rob...

[The Radio Geek]

Heya Mick,

I might have an answer for you   I too have a netbook (I am running an Acer Aspire One D250) on which I recently installed Ubuntu UNR 9.10.

Our home network has always run WEP security as we historically had some devices that could not connect using WPA.  Suddenly, I could connect to all other networks (even my next door neighbour) but not my own local network.  I used another machine to change our local network security to WPA2 and then BAM - things started working.

Now I worked around it by upgrading my wireless security - but technically I didn't actually fix the problem.  BUT I can tell you that I did a few searches while trying to find it and found:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1304892&highlight=karmic+WEP&page=2

These guys seem to have found that there is a conflicting module in the latest release.  You might try the blacklist process they suggest.

Let me know if it works!

Cheers,
:)RG

[Mick_L]

Thanks for the quick reply Rob.

It appears that the fix might sort out the connection by usb - and I'll take that. If it gets the wireless issue sorted as well, then even better. Will report back once I have tried this.

Thing with this machine is that it is connecting to normal wireless from the router, just not from the phone.

[Mick_L]

Unfortunately, the tweaks did not work. It must be something else lurking in bowels of 9.10.

[The Radio Geek]

Hmmm...

just a question before we pick apart the problem too far - is there any chance that you use a different encryption ?

RG

[Mick_L]

WMWifirouter only gives you the choice of WEP or nothing. I tried connecting with no security and had no luck there either. Yet the same computer will happily connect with windows.

It's not that important for the forthcoming  trip, but it might be important to get this working in the future, and I don't like being beaten by mere computers. I tend to think it might be a kernal issue with 9.10. And I like the idea that it could be some sort of a conflict. I'll poke around with it some more and let you know what I discover.

[Mick_L]

Somehow I got it to connect, but the signal strength indicator showed no signal. Connection information showed it had set up a proper looking IP address, but would not actually load a web page. A few packets were transferring around, but not at any blinding speed.

So tell me more about this encryption thingy... I'm guessing this has nothing to do with the security. I have a choice of 4 channels to pick from and it is recommended that channel 1 be used.

Another thing I noticed, is that the computer recognised a whole heap of, I suppose you could say 'phantom' hot spots, in that they had no signal strength, and their SSID were just gobbledygook characters. They only appeared while the phone was routing.

[The Radio Geek]

sounds like something is up... not in a good way!

I will try to connect my aspire using 9.10 to a wep network this weekend.  I have the means to test it in isolation as I know the neighbours with their poncy WAP2 encrypted network.

let me get back to you on this.. i wouldn't mind getting WEP working on the laptiop for a bit of casual wardriving

Cheers,

:)RG