[clug] Telstra Turbo 21 wireless modem (blue dongle thingy)

[Hal Ashburner]

Jim Croft wrote:
> I have an orange Telstra turbo modem and when I plugged it into
> several laptops running Ubuntu 9.04, it just worked (tm).  In fact
> better, quicker and more seamlessly that the official Telsta
> implementation on Some Other Operating System (tm).
>
> Ugraded to a new blue Telstra 21 Moede
> (http://www.telstraenterprise.com/productsservices/mobility/officemobility/Pages/Turbo21Modem.aspx?te=mb011)
> and it just doesn't work (tm).  The flashing lights indicate that it
> detects the 3g network but it will not connect and it is not visible
> on the Ubuntu network connections (but the internal 1GB micro SD card
> is).
Ok this is not "Ubuntu network connections." It's Gnome. It's the same 
on any linux distribution running Gnome. The program is called Network 
Manager,  "Net work manager applet is the drop down, it's name in the 
bin directory is "nm-applet" and it's development was paid for largely 
by Novell and RedHat iirc. </rant> ;)

If "flashing lights" really do indicate it's working enough to see the 
network then you have some kind of authentication problem.(1)
Maybe it's using chap when it should be pap or vice versa? There will be 
checkboxes for this somewhere in the network manager settings.
Have Telstra started using name & password authentication somehow?

One other thing i've seen with usb 3g modems is that they sometimes 
require more power than usb spec says a computer has to deliver on a 
single port. Some manufacturers have built usb ports that will deliver 
more power than they have to and some haven't. Those that haven't can 
require an adaptor that plugs one device into two ports so it can get 
more power. This approach is also common to usb hard drives using an 
cable with two plugs.

(1) you might want to check this. What does
$ lsusb
have to say? Does it recognise the hardware?

if you unplug it from the usb port then plug it in again then
$ dmesg | tail -20
does it look like it's setting up a device node in /dev properly or is 
it reporting some kind of error?