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#1 2011-05-13 11:23:40

RikT
Member
Registered: 2011-05-13
Posts: 11

[SOLVED] Problem with Huawei E220 and pptp VPN

Hi and thank you for reading.

I am using KDE 4.6.3 with networkmanager with network-manager-applet. All packages are up to date as of today (0.8.999).

Prior to a couple of days ago, nm-applet was happily configuring my wireless and 3G dongle without any problem. I configured a pptp VPN client using just pptpclient and as per the Arch wiki, which was also working without a problem. Since yesterday, both the VPN and the connection to the 3G dongle are failing but the wireless connection is working fine. I'm mentioning both problems together as I think they are related.

When the VPN connection failed I then noticed that the network-manager-applet will no longer connect to the dongle. When I initially try to connect to the VPN with:

pon $TUNNEL debug dump logfd 2 nodetach

everything seems fine. I then route everything to ppp0 with:

route add default dev ppp0

and then when I try to open the web brower it looks like it's about to correctly redirect through the tunnel and then hangs. The output from the terminal with the tunnel is:

Script pptp $TUNNEL --nolaunchpppd finished (pid 6220), status = 0x0
Modem hangup
Connect time 1.1 minutes.
Sent 10131 bytes, received 1898 bytes.
Script /etc/ppp/ip-down started (pid 6240)
MPPE disabled
sent [LCP TermReq id=0x2 "MPPE disabled"]
Connection terminated.
Script /etc/ppp/ip-down finished (pid 6240), status = 0x1

When I plug in the 3G dongle it is detected all right but when I try to connect as I always have done before, neither of the dots on the nm-applet go green and it just spins round for a minute and then craps out. The output of my /var/log/messages.log looks like:

May 13 11:49:07 localhost NetworkManager[2818]: <info> Activation (ttyUSB0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) scheduled...
May 13 11:49:07 localhost NetworkManager[2818]: <info> Activation (ttyUSB0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) started...
May 13 11:49:07 localhost NetworkManager[2818]: <info> Activation (ttyUSB0) Stage 1 of 5 (Device Prepare) complete.
May 13 11:49:07 localhost modem-manager[2835]: <info>  (ttyUSB0) opening serial port...
May 13 11:49:07 localhost modem-manager[2835]: <info>  Modem /org/freedesktop/ModemManager/Modems/2: state changed (disabled -> enabling)
May 13 11:49:07 localhost modem-manager[2835]: <info>  (ttyUSB1) opening serial port...
May 13 11:49:07 localhost modem-manager[2835]: Invalid error code: 303
May 13 11:49:08 localhost modem-manager[2835]: <info>  Modem /org/freedesktop/ModemManager/Modems/2: state changed (enabling -> enabled)
May 13 11:49:08 localhost NetworkManager[2818]: <info> WWAN now enabled by management service
May 13 11:49:08 localhost modem-manager[2835]: <info>  Modem /org/freedesktop/ModemManager/Modems/2: state changed (enabled -> searching)
May 13 11:50:08 localhost NetworkManager[2818]: <warn> GSM connection failed: (32) Network timeout

I have tried:

  • Downgrading networkmanager and network-manager-applet

  • removing pptpclient (the last time I saw the dongle working was before I got the VPN up)

I feel like this is something to do with the way NetworkManager is connecting to or accessing a ppp0 interface but I'm really not sure where to go next.

Last edited by RikT (2011-05-14 14:52:48)

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#2 2011-05-13 22:00:23

RikT
Member
Registered: 2011-05-13
Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Problem with Huawei E220 and pptp VPN

I've just tried a fresh install with KDE and networkmanager. I didn't try the vpn but am experiencing the same problem with the 3G dongle. I've also tried various permutations of older versions of networkmanager and network-manager-applet to no avail.

Four questions:

  1. Is there something else I have upgraded recently (around the KDE 4.6.3 release) that could be causing a problem?

  2. Is it worth reinstalling an older kernel?

  3. Why are the version numbers of the Arch networkmanager package 0.8.999-1 when the project is on 0.8.4rc-1?

  4. Why does KDE think it's using networkmanager 0.7 in the network management backend?

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#3 2011-05-14 14:50:34

RikT
Member
Registered: 2011-05-13
Posts: 11

Re: [SOLVED] Problem with Huawei E220 and pptp VPN

After trying various things and seeing that other people were having the same problem but still managing to connect using wvdial I decided to give that a go. However, I've never used wvdial before with the Huawei E220 as NetworkManager has always done the job with straight out of the box.

After reading the wiki and trying the various methods described there I was continually getting the error

> > Cannot open /dev/ttyUSB0: Device or resource busy

After googling I found this post - https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=74163 - and spotted the crucial line about having to create the directory /var/lock. Having done that the modem was then detected and I was able to connect using wvdial.

However, I then noticed that nm-applet suddenly started working! I removed hal and it is still working fine. Having made the /var/lock directory I now seem to able to connect via either nm-applet or wvdial. Problem apparently solved!

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