Two mobile internet sticks conflict -- Huawei E220 and E620

[Martin Wildam]

Binary package hint: network-manager

I have two mobile internet sticks (with each having 2 GB of credit)
for three pretty good reasons:
1. You can't see (easily) how much of the credit is left so when one
is empty I have a backup.
2. Often you are at a location where not all providers get there
with their signals so it might happen that from where you currently
are only one of the two gets a network connection.

I have a friend having two himself for the
same reasons and I think other people do that too.

3. My personal third reason for having two: I want to
help out with testing the mobile internet sticks (I do this on
a regular basis with each new beta coming out).

Since one of the last kernel updates for Ubuntu 10.04 it happens
now, that the autoconnect of the two mobile connections does
not work properly any more (I have set the mobile connections
both to autoconnect). Either one of the two connection configurations
get activated using the wrong modem (eg I plug in the Orange modem
and the connection for Drei gets activated) or network manager totally
refuses to connect after a short attempt.

I cannot really say exactly what happens because there seem to occur
different race conditions when I plug a modem in leading to slightly different
effects when I try it several times.

These are my two modems:
The first one is from Drei:
Bus 001 Device 005: ID 12d1:1003 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E220 HSDPA Modem / E270 HSDPA/HSUPA Modem
and the second from Orange:
Bus 001 Device 007: ID 12d1:1001 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E620 USB Modem

I guess, network manager somehow does not save the IDs correctly I used when configuring the connection. However, in gconf-editor I cannot find an appropriate setting for network connections that tries to be the modem. What configuration files should I post that you can have a look or what logfiles in particular are of interest in this particular case?

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.04
Package: network-manager 0.8-0ubuntu3
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.32-24.41-generic 2.6.32.15+drm33.5
Uname: Linux 2.6.32-24-generic i686
Architecture: i386
CRDA: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
Date: Wed Sep 1 08:43:12 2010
IfupdownConfig:
 auto lo
 iface lo inet loopback
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.04 LTS "Lucid Lynx" - Release i386 (20100429)
IpRoute:
 172.30.47.0/24 dev wlan0 proto kernel scope link src 172.30.47.103 metric 2
 172.30.48.0/22 dev eth0 proto kernel scope link src 172.30.50.190 metric 1
 169.254.0.0/16 dev eth0 scope link metric 1000
 default via 172.30.50.1 dev eth0 proto static
Keyfiles: Error: [Errno 2] No such file or directory
ProcEnviron:
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: network-manager

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

Conflict still occurs on Maverick nightly build from 09-23.

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

And problem still there with Maverick release.
As that worked on the first kernels of 10.04 and for sure back in 9.10 I assume there should be a solution for this.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Does it work properly if you disable autoconnect?

I also don't really see anything much from modemmanager. Could you please follow the steps at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingModemmanager . And attach the logs here so we can look into what goes wrong? Thanks!

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

Yes, if I connect them manually, it works fine (this is how I do it know for months, but it was awesome when I showed people, what plug & play could really mean ;-) ). So it would be nice if this cool feature would return.

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

First set attached is with the Orange modem which is the one it always wants to autoconnect with (and that works):

Output of the mm-test.py:
  File "./mm-test.py", line 464, in <module>
    info = modem.GetInfo()
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/dbus/proxies.py", line 140, in __call__
    **keywords)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.7/dbus/connection.py", line 630, in call_blocking
    message, timeout)
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

And the other two logs

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

second one

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

And now follow the variants for the drei modem and the tmobile modem - for both it choses the orange modem settings to connect which either seems to be successful (of course using the wrong settings).

First I attach the network-manager connection settings for these three modems:

T-Mobile: Bus 006 Device 003: ID 0af0:6971 Option Globetrotter HSDPA Modem

Orange: Bus 002 Device 006: ID 12d1:1001 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E620 USB Modem

Drei: Bus 002 Device 008: ID 12d1:1003 Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. E220 HSDPA Modem

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

These tests were done on Natty - behaviour is the same as on Lucid.
Sorry for the delay, I am under heavy load from work and family - must do this in my very few spare time.

Best regards and HTH to find the reason.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for network-manager (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 06:17, Launchpad Bug Tracker
<email address hidden> wrote:
> [Expired for network-manager (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity
> for 60 days.]

I invested a lot of time into testing - would be nice if somebody
could now have a look into those logs and into code. - Thanks.
--
Martin Wildam

http://www.google.com/profiles/mwildam

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Unfortunately these logs don't bring any more insight as to what might be the problem (or at least, they don't help me figuring it out), it all looks like it connects fine?

Then the drei modem disconnects, either because it is pulled or fails in some way. Can you provide more information? Which modem was plugged in first, followed by which, so we can clearly see what is failing when you connect both simultaneously?

From what I can tell now the drei modem was first, followed by the t-mobile one, but unfortunately it's not the same NM or MM processes; ideally we should be able to see one full session with everything to tell what goes on.

So far, I think we can safely say we've established it's not an issue with the modems and probably not ModemManager, so if you could run NetworkManager in debug mode just once to show a full session (connecting both modems, seeing each device loading the wrong connection). Here's how you can start NM in debug mode:

(reboot first, so we have a clear starting point)

sudo stop network-manager
sudo /usr/sbin/NetworkManager --log-level=DEBUG --log-domains=CORE,HW,MB,PPP,AGENTS,SETTINGS,DEVICE

The log-domains settings should allow giving all the information we need, while still being a manageable load.

Reproduce the issue, then attach /var/log/syslog (after checking it doesn't contain sensitive information).

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

On Thu, Jul 7, 2011 at 17:10, Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre
<email address hidden> wrote:
> Then the drei modem disconnects, either because it is pulled or fails in
> some way. Can you provide more information? Which modem was plugged in
> first, followed by which, so we can clearly see what is failing when you
> connect both simultaneously?

I never plugged in two of them!
I used always only one!
The problem is, that depending on the stick I plug in, NetworkManager
should try to activate the correct one of the known/configured mobile
broadband settings.

The problem is basically, that if I have several sticks preconfigured
(always set to autoconnect), when I plug in one, it might activate the
wrong configuration set. Therefore I also have split the logs into
several. In my opinion it does not make sense putting everything in
one log because they are completey separate test cases.

Each log says in the filename which stick I was plugging in.
And it always chooses the Orange configuration to activate.

I don't know on what it depends which configuration NetworkManager
chooses to activate. Do you know?

Somehow depending on a Modem ID it should find the correct settings,
but maybe NetworkManager isn't storing that (correctly/any more).

Best regards, Martin.
--
Martin Wildam

http://www.google.com/profiles/mwildam

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Ah, unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to match 3G modem to particular connections yet (including because you technically could use the same stick with multiple connections).

My suggestion would be to try something though: verify what the network ID might be when you connect (which you should be able to tell from the modem logs (the number in the +COPS command), from information on the internet (http://wiki.sakis3g.org/wiki/index.php?title=Known_operators) or elsewhere. For instance, 23210 appears to be the ID for Drei; and 23203 would be the one for T-Mobile. You may want to try those in the Network ID field in the connection's configuration dialog, but it's not exactly what it's meant for (e.g. the connection will still try to activate, fail, etc.). This behaviour makes sense considering some people may genuinely want to connect one modem to an arbitrary number of connections to different providers, possibly roaming.

[Martin Wildam (mwildam)]

But it worked in 9.04 and if I remember right 9.10 also. 10.04 was the
version that broke it. Can't really believe it was pure accident, that it
worked before.

Am 08.07.2011 07:56 schrieb "Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre" <<email address hidden>
>:

Ah, unfortunately, I don't think there is a way to match 3G modem to
particular connections yet (including because you technically could use
the same stick with multiple connections).

My suggestion would be to try something though: verify what the network
ID might be when you connect (which you should be able to tell from the
modem logs (the number in the +COPS command), from information on the
internet (http://wiki.sakis3g.org/wiki/index.php?title=Known_operators)
or elsewhere. For instance, 23210 appears to be the ID for Drei; and
23203 would be the one for T-Mobile. You may want to try those in the
Network ID field in the connection's configuration dialog, but it's not
exactly what it's meant for (e.g. the connection will still try to
activate, fail, etc.). This behaviour makes sense considering some
people may genuinely want to connect one modem to an arbitrary number of
connections to different providers, possibly roaming.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/627883
Title:

Two mobile internet sticks conflict

Status in “network-manager” package in Ubuntu:
 Confirmed

Bug description:
Binary package hint: network-manager

I have two mobile internet sticks (with ...
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