gsm – muellis blog

While being in Ireland I happened to have access to an Irish eMobile SIM card and USB modem. The modem was a Huawei e173 and it worked perfectly well on a recent Ubuntu installation. Even the USB modeswitch worked out of the box 🙂

However, I couldn’t dial up with any of my Linux machines while I double checked that it worked on Windows using their software. The NetworkManager wouldn’t list the settings for eMobile and every other setting from Meteor didn’t work. The NetworkManager in debug mode revealed that the connection got cut just after the PPPd requested configuration settings. I tried to change the PPPd settings for hours with no success.

Funnily enough, not even my N900 could connect to the Internet using the predefined connection. That was named “Meteor DATA” and used “data.mymeteor.ie” as APN.

Also very interesting, that I couldn’t find the neccessary dial up information *anywhere* on the web. The eMobile.ie site is utterly unstructured and didn’t allow me to find any sensible information at all. I sent them an email but I still haven’t receive any answer.

After having had access to a Windows box with their software again, I found out that it uses the APN: “broadband.eircommbb.ie“. Putting that into the NetworkManager makes it dial up *yay*!

So I hope this information is useful for anybody wanting to use their eMobile SIM Card with their Linux based system. I also prepared a patch for mobile-broadband-provider-info so you should be able to click the connection via NetworkManager easily 🙂

I have just arrived from HAR2009 which was a very awesome event! We were camping for 5 days, drinking beer and attending lectures. Some of us visited Workshops, but sadly I didn’t. I probably was too busy attending talks and visiting the Toasti booth 😉

The CCC has built up a great Dome as well as a big tent for hacking. CCCHH brought Milliways, the last pub at the end of the universe and it was a really cool place to hang out. There were many people from different countries which made it really interesting and enjoyable to just be there. Last but not least, the beer was great 😉

Others have brought a GSM Network! How awesome is that?! Harald Welte and his fellow GSM-Tent members have set up the “42” Network and we were able to place as many (internal) phone calls and SMS as we liked. Of course, we started to script that 😉 So I found out, that sending an SMS via a serial connection to my phones modem is as simple as the following lines:

import serial
import time
 
DEVICE = '/dev/ttyACM0'
 
def send_sms(nr, msg):
    ser = serial.Serial(DEVICE, 115200, timeout=1)
    ser.write('AT\r')
    line = ser.readline()
    line = ser.readline()
    assert line == "OK\r\n"
 
    ser.write('AT+CMGF=1\r')
    line = ser.readline()
    line = ser.readline()
    assert line == "OK\r\n"
 
    ser.write('AT+CMGS="%s"\r' % nr)
    ser.write('%s\n' % msg)
    ser.write(chr(26))
    time.sleep(3)
    lines = ser.readlines()
    print lines
    ser.close()

Sadly, I couldn’t hack more with the GSM network because it was shut down rather early and I didn’t use my computer much during the lecture time. So next time I’ll try to reproduce the Curse of Silence and play around with PDU SMS.

So I have been to a lot of interesting villages and I met some interesting people but sadly GNOME people couldn’t make it. Maybe we’ll have a GNOME Village next time… 🙂 If you are interested in how the camp looked, watch this impressions movie or click through the media.

The next CCCamp will probably be in two years and according to rumours it’ll happen in Finowfurt again. I’m really looking forward to that event!

Tag: gsm

eMobile, NetworkManager and You

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