FC14: mobile broadband, dialing succeeds but no ping to internet

[acorlato]

In Fedora 14 (kernel 2.6.35.10-74.fc14.i686) I am not able to get an internet connection on my laptop via mobile broadband. However dialing succeeds and the provider starts the daily flate rate accounting.

I tried the graphical network management as well as wvdial and even sakis3g (achitecture free variant from www.sakis3g.org).

With wvdial (well configured I think) and sakis3g the dial connection is established (permanent blue light on Huawei E169). "netstat -ie" shows that the network configuration has changed (device pp0 instead of eth0 and "netstat -rn" shows that default router is set to 10.64.64.64). But "ping" does not receive data from any internet IP address and browser cannot render any website. A later check call of my prepaid balance said that the daily rate countdown was initiated (so I pay for nothing).

The GUI of the KDE network icon seems to work similar but does not set the usb key into the connected state (only blinking blue light and break-off after a few seconds).

Disabling of selinux didn't change anything as well.

With Mandriva 2010 I didn't have any problems with same mobile key and provider.

Installed networking packages:

rpm -qa |egrep -y 'NetworkManager|wvdial|kde-plasma-net'
wvdial-1.61-3.fc13.i686
NetworkManager-gnome-0.8.1-10.git20100831.fc14.i686
NetworkManager-glib-0.8.1-10.git20100831.fc14.i686
kde-plasma-networkmanagement-0.9-0.28.20101011.fc14.i686
NetworkManager-pptp-0.8.1-1.fc14.i686
NetworkManager-openvpn-0.8.1-1.fc14.i686
knetworkmanager-libs-0.9-0.28.20101011.fc14.i686
NetworkManager-0.8.1-10.git20100831.fc14.i686

Is there a bug in Fedora 14 (Laughlin)? I did install FC14 by preupdate from FC12. In FC12 I did not use the mobile connection.

[stoat]

But "ping" does not receive data from any internet IP address and browser cannot render any website.If you're pinging a URL, then try pinging an IP address. This could be a DNS resolution problem. Anyway, it happens all the time. If that worked, then try entering some DNS nameserver IP addresses into NetworkManager (nm-connection-editor). Details available if needed.

Other harmless and reversible things to try include toggling the Firefox and Thunderbird config property network.dns.disableIPv6 to true and disabling the ipv6 service. Details for those also available if needed.

[acorlato]

If you're pinging a URL, then try pinging an IP address. This could be a DNS resolution problem. Anyway, it happens all the time. If that worked, then try entering some DNS nameserver IP addresses into NetworkManager (nm-connection-editor). Details available if needed.

Other harmless and reversible things to try include toggling the Firefox and Thunderbird config property network.dns.disableIPv6 to true and disabling the ipv6 service. Details for those also available if needed.

Sure! But I tried IP addresses.

DNS in my opinion is only relevant for pings with names. The IP address which is set as default router (here 10.64.64.64) must be connectable by ping. Isn't it? But I couldn't ping this IP address.

In the case of wvdial there was an additional line with zeroes in the fields for destination and gateway. To eliminate it I called

route del default
route add default gw 10.64.64.64

But it did not help, too.

[stoat]

Sorry. I didn't intend to post some useless thing and make myself look stupid. Honestly, I didn't notice that you had been attempting to ping IP addresses. Good luck and adieu.

[acorlato]

I made more experiments with wvdial and espied that the script /etc/ppp/ip-up was called.

By inserting

echo "$@" >>/tmp/ppp_ip-up-params.out

into the script "ip-up" I discovered that the sixth parameter wasn't provided. But the sixth parameter should be "ppp0" (in this case). The script sets it in the variable $LOGDEVICE and passes it as first parameter to annother script:

/etc/ppp/ip-up.ipv6to4 ${LOGDEVICE}

Examining the script "ip-up.ipv6to4" I disvovered that the first parameter is obligatory. Internally the parameter is used to expand the name of a config file:

/etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-$1 (==> /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-ppp0).

But that file wasn't existent. I could restore the last version from my former Mandriva Linux:

DEVICE=ppp0
ONBOOT=no
METRIC=40
USERCTL=yes
LINESPEED=115200
MODEMPORT=/dev/ttyUSB0
DEBUG=yes
PERSIST=yes
DEFROOT=yes
ACCOUNTING=yes
CELLULAR_CID=3

And voila: wvdial is working as I would have expected it from the beginning. Perhaps the linespeed may be increased.

So, in my opinion there are bugs in some tools. Neither the administrative GUI tools nore the applet in kde-plasma-networkmanagement were able to handle that right by providing the lacking things.