[networkmanager] Mobile broadband support disappeared on me

KShots · Guru Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 591 Location: Florida

Hey all,
I have been using NetworkManager successfully for several months to connect to my phone via bluetooth and use it for internet access. During a recent emerge world update, I saw that the default USE flags for networkmanager had changed (but that networkmanager itself wasn't being updated to another version), and that to have modemmanager enabled I needed to enable the ppp USE flag (which I didn't have support for in my kernel, and was working fine without).

I first tried to disable modemmanager so I could keep ppp disabled, and that removed the Mobile Broadband support from (at least) the NetworkManagement KDE plasma app. I then tried to enable modemmanager and ppp and recompile (but I didn't build in support for PPP in my kernel), and the option was still gone. I eventually broke down and added PPP support to my kernel... and it was _still_ gone.

Has anyone else noticed this? Has anyone worked through this?
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eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 3:06 pm Post subject:

You should need ppp support in your kernel regardless, mobile broadband tends to use ppp. Not sure how it worked without it, unless you were somehow using some other protocol like ACM over USB (then again this also should require PPP).

Now in the recent kernels I've been running into many issues with bluetooth rfcomm. I'm not sure if any stable kernel past 3.8 work yet (3.8 to 3.11 would crash the kernel on disconnect, 3.12 stopped the crashes but does not work with modemmanager, and I had a patched 3.12.6 working but released 3.12.13 vanilla does not; however some of the patches should have made it into gentoo-sources). You will need to have USE=modemmanager and ppp and reemerge networkmanager (and its dependencies which should pull in modemmanager/ppp). It's been a mess.

Also the default Gentoo Networkmanager prior to the latest does not work with bt-rfcomm for some reason or another; however the latest should work.

Again I am baffled how one can use bluetooth-rfcomm without ppp. That just doesn't make sense to me...

KShots · Guru Joined: 09 Oct 2003 Posts: 591 Location: Florida

I only used bnep for mobile broadband over bluetooth.
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eccerr0r · Posted: Fri Mar 14, 2014 9:51 pm Post subject:

Ah. Well, it seems there's a lot of code that's getting cruddy in there, not many people using bluetooth networking anymore (seems the preference is wifi). May need to forward upstream...
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