bkil vs. programming

Installing a Huawei E352 HSPA+ dongle took ages under Windows. I had to abort it halfway through because I was running out of time. In retrospective, it was probably caused by a conflict with the previous modem's connection dashboard. I was shocked when I wanted to resume next time. Some time after inserting the device, the system asked for a .sys file from a driver disk. Neither modem worked anymore. As usual for this kind of dongle, no vendor download is available as the device itself contains all drivers on a virtual CD-ROM. However, that is only accessible before it's  switched to modem mode  by the parts already installed. Chicken and egg problem. Puppy Linux to the rescue! Thankfully, I had it on my USB flash along with DSL and SliTaz . The system loaded to RAM rapidly. I copied over the drivers from the modem to another USB flash. As a plaything, I enjoyed the command line and the responsivity, also browsing the web a bit over 3G. After rebooting to Windows, re...

It works out of the box with a plain wvdial after a small adjustment (need to erase the +FCLASS=0 part). It is detected as the following device (after the automatic mode switch): ID 12d1:1506 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E398 LTE/UMTS/GSM Modem/Networkcard For the record, I paste the wvdial.conf configured for T-Mobile in Hungary: [Dialer Defaults] Init1 = ATZ Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0 Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet" Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0 Username = wap Password = wap Modem Type = Analog Modem Baud = 9600 New PPPD = yes ISDN = 0 Phone = *99# Stupid Mode = 1 Most of the settings are not crucial, but some of them depend on your carrier, like "Init3", "Username" and "Password", while "Modem" depends on your device.

If you connect this modem to a machine running Ubuntu, it mounts and opens the virtual driver disk. If you unmount the partition, usb_modeswitch automatically kicks in and switches the device from CD-ROM emulation to modem mode. Unfortunately, Network Manager would not connect regardless of configuration. However, after some trial and error, wvdial was able to establish connection and start transferring data. After reducing the unknowns, I've devised a small script which waits until the drive gets automatically mounted, unmounts the device, waits for settling and then establishes a connection with wvdial. This script was hooked up to a specific device addition udev rule to make it run automagically. As the devised udev rule did not narrow down the event good enough, actually two such invocations are done for each insertion, so a bit of an ugly hacking was involved to implement mutual exclusion.