Dtac Aircard With Gnu/linux

[siamect]

Dear all

This may be old news for some but...

Just want to report that the "DTAC aircard life is colorful colorful" work fine on GNU/Linux

(it should... like all other "aircards", it's all built on "standards"... well... if MSCHAPv2 can be called standard...)

On the box it says: System requirements: Windows 2k/XP/Vista/7 ans MacOS 10.4-5-6.

Obviously they have no clue what they are talking about. DTAC most likely have larger resources than I do, still they are unable to understand what the system requirements really are. Some kind of defect??! Now someone say that they are not unable, they just don't do it... That would be worse, it can't be that bad.

I use it on Kubuntu Karmic with the network manager and here is what I did:

Before I got it to work I had to install

sudo apt-get install network-manager-pptp pptp-linux resolvconf

and then restart the networkmanager (or reboot). Now you have the MSCHAPv2 protocol plus some other stuff.

For some reason I never received any DNS so I have to config this manually. (that's the reason for the resolvconf installation above)

sudo nano /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf

insert this line:

supersede domain-name-servers 8.8.8.8, 8.8.8.4;

or if you don't like googles DNS, here are the openDNS

supersede domain-name-servers 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220;

plug in the usb aircard. This would open a dialog (at least on Ubuntu) and you select whatever makes sense. If there is no dialog automatically opening...

In Kubuntu there is a message saying a device is plugged in. Click on the up-arrow on the right side. (do not open it as a usb-drive)

Right click the knetwork manager and choose "Manage connections" (this is on Kubuntu 9.10 and KDE4)

Under the tab mobile broadband, create a new one.

Connection name (up to you)

phone number: *99#

APN: www.dtac.co.th

no username

no password

type: any

no pin

no puk

on the ppp tab the following is checked, all others are unchecked:

authenication

MSCHAPv2

EAP

stateful MPPE (greyed out)

allow BSD compression

Allow Deflate compression

save, apply, ok, etc...

You should now have an icon in the knetwork manager, click it and it should connect.

If it doesn't, blame me, not DTAC. I probably forgot to tell you something important. Take a look in the syslog first to get a hint... google it.

And please write your experiences, finding and solutions here, so others can find it too.

Happy Valentine

Martin

[SeanMoran]

Thank you very much for this helpful information mate. I run Ubuntu and next weekend is the trial for the aircard I will be picking up next payday with an Happy DTAC sim card.

It's good to know that it's already covered by the Ubuntu pickup system, like the ZyXEL router I bought last month has been, even though it says Win2K etc, etc on the box.

[siamect]

Dear all

Happy that this topic still scores higher than the barbiedoll thread

One update on the subject...

After couple of days experience I can say that I sometimes get DNS server IPs from the dhcp and sometimes not... It's unreliable at best.

The trick is to set static DNS but as done above it doesn't work properly. It just did after the install but one reboot later it seems to be a bug somewhere... possibly a conflict between the resolvconf and the knetwork manager.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/r...onf/+bug/448095 has some stuff about this and I did the workaround but same there... works until reboot... high suction factor...

So the best hack I can come up with now is to do a raw and stupid

sudo su -c "echo 'nameserver 8.8.8.8'>/etc/resolv.conf"

right after the connection is up... works every time.

/etc/resolv.conf is over written by the knetwork manager alt resolvconf every time a connection is up/down.

The real way to set static stuff is in the /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf but it doesn't work for mobile broadband connections. It works for everything else... just to be as annoying as possible...

Maybe time for some upstream checking. I bet Debian has working solution for this.

Ok I'll be back when case I find a better way of doing this.

Martin