This article is just a continuation of my first article about my experience with mobile broadband Internet on a Linux system. To cut the long story short a current network managers are trying to do a pretty good job by establishing a Mobile Broadband connection in a Plug & Play manner, however, they are not always successful to do so and user ends up with frustration and full hands of debugging and guessing what might went wrong instead of spending time with intended work.

Since the default network managers are not always able to establish connection the Plug & Play situation rather becomes Plug & Pray and this is not what Linux users are able to tolerate.

Good for us in Linux world there is always an alternative solution. The solution was suggested to me by “forcefsck” ( thanks ) that instead of leaving the work to a default network I should try Sakis3G a All-in-one Mobile Broadband connection script. This article describes my experience with this script as well as it will guide you trough the installation and configuration and the actual Mobile Broadband connection.

Installation

The installation of this script is very simple. In fact all what needs to be done as in the installation part is to only download script, gunzip it and make it executable.

NOTE: Optional step is to confirm MD5 hash. Download a script with wget:

$ wget http://www.sakis3g.org/versions/latest/i386/sakis3g.gz

decompress file with:

$ gunzip sakis3g.gz

Become a root and install ( copy ) the script to some location within your PATH such as: /usr/local/bin/.

# cp sakis3g /usr/local/bin/

To complete the installation part, give the script a executable permissions:

# chmod +x /usr/local/bin/sakis3g

Configuration

As crazy as it sounds there is not configuration required prior to establishing mobile broadband Internet connection using sakis3g. Any descend Linux distribution should have already all prerequisites install by default. The sakis3g is reconfigured to recognize many Mobile Broadband devices and configure them on fly.

The only package you may want to check whether is installed on your system is “ppp”. If ppp package is present on your you are ready to establish Mobile Broadband connection.

Establishing Mobile Broadband Connection

Start the sakis3g script from a command line as non-root user:

$ sakis3g

and follow the instructions:

Create a new connection:

Enter root/administrator password:

Select interface ( or help ):

Select your connection preference:

and you are done:

Conclusion

As you can see Sakis3g does its job well. I have tested this script couple times with 100% success. Before the default network manager on your system becomes stable this script will save you lots of headache and time. The only one annoyance I had with Sakis3G script was with dialog “Select ANP …” . This dialog box is too big to fit on my 1024×786 screen. However, I’m sure that it will be fixed with the next release.

Whether you are successful or not when establishing Mobile Broadband Internet connection with Saki3G leave your feedback on Sakis3G’s home page. This will help rectify your problem an improve the script performance.

Troubleshooting

When establishing connection make sure that you disable your default network manager. Sakis3g and your default manager will fight for the same device and whoever is first will lock this resource to it self. In my case ( fedora 14 ) it was default modem-manager which prevented Sakis3G to establish Mobile Broadband connection. In any case Sakis3G will provide you with PID of the process holding your usb device. Simply release this resource by killing this process.

Secondly when you disable your network manager it may happen that you would not have nameserver defined. If you successfully created your Broadband internet connection with Sakis3G and the browser says that i could not fetch the page make sure that you have a nameserver defined in /etc/resolf.conf. If not you can always use:

# echo nameserver 8.8.8.8 >> /etc/resolv.conf

Appendix

$ sakis3g report


Sakis3G version: 0.2.0e
Using embedded Usb-ModeSwitch version:
 * Version 1.1.3 (C) Josua Dietze 2010
Kernel version: 2.6.35.11-83.fc14.i686
Architect: i686
Selected UI is: kdialog
Interface: P-t-P (ppp0)
Network ID: 50503
Operator name: Vodafone Australia
APN: vfprepaymbb
Modem: K3571-Z
Modem type: USB
Kernel driver: option
Device: /dev/ttyUSB3
Variables: --interactive APN="vfprepaymbb" USBDRIVER="option"
 MODEM="19d2:1010" DISPLAY=":0" 
LOCALAUTHORITY="/tmp/kde-lilo/xauth-500-_0"