Huawei E220 Optus Wireless

At work recently, to meet our growing on-the-go connection demands, we got hold of some of the Optus Wireless USB modems. The rebadged Huawei E220. In the spirit of my previous posts on Telstra NextG under Linux, I want to use these with Linux. They are natively supported in recent kernels which is great news. There were a few gotchas with Ubuntu 8.04 though.

Gotcha 1
It seems in there is a bug in the airprime module in the kernel I am running. There is a bug report for the error and fortunately an easy enough fix.
$ uname -ar
Linux pegasus 2.6.24-19-generic #1 SMP Wed Jun 18 14:15:37 UTC 2008 x86_64 GNU/Linux

To fix you need to blacklist the airprime module so it does not load. This of course is only until a proper code fix / new kernel is released. You can read about how to black list here. You will need to unplug / replug the device after removing the module and blacklisting.

Gotcha 2
I use pppconfig and the associated pon / poff / plog commands to dial up. There are graphical programs available but the CLI ones are so much quicker for me: plug in modem, open terminal, run pon optus, use connection.

In the case of the Next G device pppconfig managed to create a working set of ppp scripts. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case for the OWB device. Here are the ppp and chat scripts I am using the connect:

cat /etc/ppp/peers/optus
hide-password
noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/optus"
/dev/ttyUSB0
115200

user ppp
password ppp

noipdefault
replacedefaultroute
defaultroute
persist
noauth
usepeerdns

user ppp
password ppp

debug
local
novj
nodeflate
nobsdcomp
passive

holdoff 5
lcp-echo-interval 0
crtscts

AND

cat /etc/chatscripts/optus
TIMEOUT 3
ABORT BUSY
ABORT 'NO CARRIER'
ABORT VOICE
ABORT 'NO DIALTONE'
ABORT 'NO DIAL TONE'
ABORT 'NO ANSWER'
ABORT DELAYED
"" ATZ

OK AT&FE0Q0V1
OK 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","Connect"'

OK ATDT*99***1#
TIMEOUT 30
CONNECT ""

Happy interneting!