Felix' Blog » nm http://fetzig.org About open source, education and random other Stuff Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:33:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Tethering in Fedora – Using your mobile phone with NetworkManager to surf the web http://fetzig.org/2009/07/04/tethering-in-fedora-using-your-mobile-phone-with-networkmanager-to-surf-the-web/ http://fetzig.org/2009/07/04/tethering-in-fedora-using-your-mobile-phone-with-networkmanager-to-surf-the-web/#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 17:23:43 +0000 Felix Kaechele http://fetzig.org/?p=42 Recently I tried to use my Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone to access the web via it’s 3G modem that is available over Bluetooth. I wanted it to work together with NetworkManager nicely so that other programs (such as Pidgin) receive the online status and also to ease the connection/disconnection process. However NM and also gnome-bluetooth are not ready for the job yet (Blueman alledgedly is).
I found a blog entry by Harald Hoyer that offers a Python script to simplify the whole process of adding the phone as a modem. However that script isn’t up to date anymore. Unfortunately NM doesn’t trust HAL to determine the capabilities of the phone anymore (thus allowing this nice Python hack-script) but rather additionally asks udev for it’s opinion. This will result in the following error message in the debug log of NM:

NetworkManager: <info> (rfcomm0): found serial port (udev: hal:GSM)
NetworkManager: <info> (rfcomm0): ignoring due to lack of probed mobile broadband capabilties

I worked around this by setting all rfcomm* ports to be “probed” modems via an udev rule. I know that this probably is not the nicest way to do this but hey, it works. Furthermore I updated the script to the new Python 2.6 popen functions.

Here is what I came up with:

dialup-bluetooth.py
90-rfcomm-nm.rules

The udev rule belongs in /etc/udev/rules.d. The python script can be put anywhere you want but keep in mind that it must be run as root.

Have fun browsing the web on the go! :)

]]> http://fetzig.org/2009/07/04/tethering-in-fedora-using-your-mobile-phone-with-networkmanager-to-surf-the-web/feed/ 6