costela.net

I had to struggle a bit with the mobile stick I just got from Vodafone and thought it might be useful to write it down somewhere.

The Huawei K3520 (recognized automatically by Linux 2.6.31 as a “E620 USB Modem”) seems to work without many problems, the only hardware related issue being that sometimes, seemingly at random, the memory stick part will be loaded and sometimes just the USB modem part.

The Vodafone Germany specific configuration, on the other hand, wasn’t so easy to find online. The working config I currently have with NetworkManager 0.7.1 is:

Number: *99# (this is the default, but it warrants an explicit mention since I’ve found other examples online with “*99***1#”, and that didn’t work)
Username: vodafone
Password: vodafone
APN: web.vodafone.de (this seems to vary wildly from country to country)

The rest is either default or empty.

And lastly, taken from this LP bug, I had to change

<deny send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.PPP"/>

to

<allow send_destination="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager" send_interface="org.freedesktop.NetworkManager.PPP"/>

in /etc/dbus-1/system.d/NetworkManager.conf, to avoid the “Looks like pppd didn’t initialize our dbus module” error.

After all this the connection still needs a push to work (it rarely – if ever – works on the first try and I haven’t dug deep enough to decide if this is a Vodafone, a driver or a NetworkManager problem), but after connecting everything is shinny.