On the futility of calling tech support.

Sometime last week I stopped getting internet connectivity through my cell provider.

I made the mistake of calling them. Between navigating their voice menu system, and talking to first tier help, waiting while they talked to second tier help, I only lost about 30 minutes of my time.

However, they told me that the problem was the bluetooth connection to my phone.

The problem really was that pppd was looking for an IP address in the 10.x.x.x range, and my provider had stopped NATing those. This took me about 20 minutes to fix.

Although I probably didn't have to do this, I created a new GPRS CID (Connection IDentifier) on my phone from the data provided by Opera . This site will spit out the APN, username, and password settings you need to set to establish a GPRS connection with a wide variety of international providers.

There are a million different gprs configurations for linux pppd out there. Here is another.

Here is the "peers" file:


/dev/rfcomm0
115200
defaultroute
usepeerdns
nodetach
crtscts
lock
noauth
local
debug

lcp-echo-failure 4
lcp-echo-interval 65535

connect    "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chat_scripts/gprs-connect-chat"
disconnect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/ppp/chat_scripts/gprs-disconnect-chat"

Here is the connect script.


TIMEOUT		10
ECHO 		ON
ABORT		'BUSY'
ABORT		'ERROR'
ABORT		'NO ANSWER'

SAY		"Resetting phone...\n"
""		'ATZ'
OK		'ATE1V1'

ABORT		'NO CARRIER'
OK		'ATD*99***4#'
		    # the '2' is for CID 2 on the phone
SAY		"Waiting for connect...\n"
CONNECT		""

And here is the disconnect script


""		"\K"
""		"+++ATH"
SAY		"GPRS disconnected"

jack | posted Tue Nov 21 17:49:23 2006 | updated Sun Jan 7 22:47:53 2007 | #
category: debris