Martin Notes

I’ve been spending a lot of time at a client that doesn’t allow foreign laptops on its network. This means that I can’t be online a lot of the time, which is rather problematic since we work with off shore teams and I’d like to be able to contact them. So I thought I’d buy a UMTS usb dongle to be able to be online all the time. I’ve read quite a lot on the support of Ubuntu of broadband mobile connections and I expected to insert the dongle and start working. Sadly that was not the case.

On inserting the dongle nothing happened. After some research it looked like the kernel didn’t recognize the usb for what it was, but it tried to mount it as a drive. This appears to be a known problem since the dongle also contains a drive with drivers for Windows and Mac.

The model number on the dongle is: K3520-Z. The following shows how I got it to work properly.

Find vendor and product ID

First of all you have to find the vendor and product IDs. For this you run:

lsusb

This shows you a list of connected usb devices which looks something like:

Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 010: ID 044e:300d Alps Electric Co., Ltd Bluetooth Controller (ALPS/UGPZ6)
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 05ca:183a Ricoh Co., Ltd
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0409:005a NEC Corp. HighSpeed Hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 054c:02d5 Sony Corp.
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 002 Device 012: ID 19d2:2000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub

The Vodafone device is listed without a vendor name, that’s how you can recognize it. In the list above the vendor:product ID is: 19d2:2000.

Kernel parameters

You should add these to your kernel parameters to explain the kernel that it is a serial device. For that you open the menu.lst file.

sudo pico /boot/grub/menu.lst

Find the kernel boot entry and add:

usbserial.vendor=0x19d2 usbserial.product=0x2000

At the end of the kernel you start. The whole line looks something like:

kernel          /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.28-11-generic root=UUID=3021230a-6c89-43f9-9e69-5d95dde4ff9b ro quiet splash usbserial.vendor=0x19d2 usbserial.product=0x2000

Install drivers

When you’ve done that you should install the vodafone drivers from betavine:

• usb-modeswitch_0.9.7_i386.deb
• vodafone-mobile-connect_svn20090502_all.deb

I’m not sure why these are required, but they seem to install something that picks up the dongle when you insert it.

NOTE: running the Vodafone connect script didn’t work for me.

Configure connection

Finally you go to the Network Connections (System > Preferences > Network Connections) and add the connections in  the Mobile Broadband tab. Don’t forget to enter your pin code!

Restart

Then you should restart to activate the kernel parameters. After the restart I inserted the dongle and repeated:

 dmesg

Until I saw:

[ 1303.650357] option 2-2:1.1: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.651186] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
[ 1303.654780] option 2-2:1.2: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.654907] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2
[ 1303.657438] option 2-2:1.3: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.657549] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB3
[ 1303.659483] option 2-2:1.4: GSM modem (1-port) converter detected
[ 1303.659594] usb 2-2: GSM modem (1-port) converter now attached to ttyUSB4
[ 1303.661613] scsi6 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
[ 1303.663691] usb-storage: device found at 11
[ 1303.663697] usb-storage: waiting for device to settle before scanning

Connect

Then the NetworkManager dropdown (left mouse click on the network icon) shows the Broadband Modem entry. You can click on it to activate the connection. It’s not 100% stable for me, but the connection works good enough once it’s connected.

When I had my wireless and the 3G connection open I ended with a completely frozen machine. I fixed that by disabling my wireless on the hardware level. That is: turn off the switch.

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