19d2:fff1 ubuntu

A n00bs progress in setting up a Neotel branded ZTE WCDMA device on Ubuntu 12.4 LTE. Hint: It's is not as easy as it sounds or should be.

From the discussions (for Ubuntu 9 and 10) it seems there are two problems:
Problem 1) the device is a modem and a memory stick/flash drive so that the windows drivers can be automatically installed when the device is plugged into a windows machine.
Problem 2) Even though Ubuntu detects the device as a modem when it tries to connect if fails due to some misconfiguration.

Problem 1 is not a problem in Ubuntu 12.4 since it detects the device correctly and installs it as a modem and not a memory/drive device.

Problem 2 is a bit more tricky.
There are several ways of getting a network/modem running under Linux (as one would expect). These 3 I tried and had varying degrees of success:

1. using the Network Manager
2. using pppconfig and pon
3. using wcdialconfig and wvdial

1) It seemed to me that the easiest way would be the NM. I set up a new mobile broadband connection using the wizard, but that did not work. For some reason when looking at syslog I can see that it uses the ttyUSB1 connector of the modem.
However, using dmesg in a terminal window:
dmesg | grep -e modem -e tty
we can see that the device exposes 5 ttyUSB ports:
[ 9215.940690] option 5-1:1.0: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.940803] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 9215.942720] option 5-1:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.942819] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1
[ 9215.944688] option 5-1:1.2: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.944790] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[ 9215.946688] option 5-1:1.3: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.946789] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB3
[ 9215.948657] option 5-1:1.4: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 9215.948755] usb 5-1: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB4I will have to get back to this later and figure out how to the NM to use USB0 instead of USB1.

2) pppconfig and pon works. with a bit of knowledge gleaned from above.
In a terminal window type:
sudo pppconfig
a nice text menu appears and guides you through the process.

• Create a new connection
• name your connection something like: neotel
• use dynamic DNS
• use PAP - when I specified CHAP the modem no longer worked
• type your login name from the Neotel box. something like 0881234567@neotel.co.za
• enter password, default is 1234
• leave baud rate at 115200
• tone dialing
• telephone number is #777
• type port manually and enter /dev/ttyUSB0
• Confirm that you typed everything correctly and Write the config file

Now you can use pon to start your network. Type
sudo pon neotel
the network should start. You can check the progress by looking at
plog -f

3) 12.4 does not come stock with wvdial, so I had to download it after I got the connection up with pon.
First:
sudo apt-get install wvdial
Then run:
sudo wvdialconfThis will scan your modem devices and create a config file. However it always sets the baud rate to 9600 (ugh)
Now edit wvdial.conf
sudo vim /etc/wvdial.conf
change all the settings to the correct ones. Remember to remove all ; (comments)

Followed by:
sudo wvdial

I'll update this blog once i get it running with NM.

These forums helped:

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1411741.html
or
http://techsk.blogspot.com/2009/09/installing-usb-modem-zte-ac2726-in.html

and this site may have been helpful but has a horrible error
http://www.pharscape.org/networkmanager-0.7.0-and-3g-wwan-modems.html

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