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[Birdman]

This is my first venture with mobile broadband and I am about to give up. I have an Alcatel One Touch X220S on the Virginmobile network and I believe I have done everything necessary to get connected. I now cannot decide whether some of the configuration is incorrect or it simply doesn't work properly?

The story:

When first plugged in the dongle it showed as a storage device as 1bbb:f000. After unmounting the device it changes to 1bbb:0017. I later discovered from the user_modeswitch forum that the device had actually switched at this point and was now ready for action.

I initially tried useing wvdial and after trial and error appeared to have a connection i.e. no apparent errors and a solid light on the dongle (more later). However, I could not load any web pages - just error messages! I then remembered the LXF113 article and that motivated me to try kppp. This was good because of the useful display giving some information about the connection. Sure enough I connected and peeked at 5kb/sec. It took about a minute to load the google home page - not great but a result! I disconnected and tried again but it wouldn't work and kppp kept locking up. It was late so I turned off the box for the night. Following day I got connected with kppp (apparently) with a data rate of 1kb/sec and no response from firefox. I had a steady light on the dongle but no data. I then went back to wvdial and got a solid light on the dongle - but no data.

Lights on dongle:

The booklet gives the following posibilites:
Blue Modem is on
Green and orange Alternate blinking Searching for network
Green Registered HSPA/UMTS
Orange Registered GPRS/EDGE

I have never seen a blue light. If the PC is turned of with the dongle plugged in I get an orange light. When turned on it can flash either green, orange or RED. When I have an apparent connection it is either solid red or green (but not orange).

Given the absence of red in their note and my absence of blue in use I do not know what to think.

I am using LInux Mint Isadora KDE. Here is one of my sample wvdial.conf files that appears to connect:

[PCNetSpec]

-->Warning: Could not modify /etc/ppp/pap-secrets: Permission denied

Looks like a permission problem to me, are you running wvdial as root:

[Birdman]

Good point. I did initially run as root, because wvdial would not work as user. I noted that wvdial is a member of the dip group and added the group to the member permissions so that I could run wvdial as a user.

The next question is whether I should be running wvdial as root? Is this a security risk? If so then are there other permission amends that can be made to allow a user to run wvdial?

Interestingly kppp is launched as a user and doesn't need root permissions. Mind you I can't get a decent connection with that either!

[PCNetSpec]

I suppose you could create a group called something like 'dialout', then change the permissions of your /etc/ppp/pap-secrets and /etc/ppp/chap-secrets to allow everyone from the group 'dialout' to be able to read/write to them, then add yourself to that group.

But I would just run wvdial with root privileges with sudo.

Not a security risk as sudo is *only* giving the *dialer* root access.

Switching user to root with su, then running wvdial on the other hand may be a security risk... never really thought about it.
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[Birdman]

Running as root makes no difference. Looking at the syslog suggests that the IP address cannot be determined: