Welcome!

Welcome to the home page of Charles N Wyble. Charles is a 24 year old systems guy, hacker and entrepreneur currently living in El Monte CA, with his wife of 3 years.

He is currently employed as a system engineer for Ripple TV with responsibility for a nation wide advertising network.

In his spare time he serves as Chief Technology Officer for the SoCalWiFI.net project, runs a hacker space in the San Gabriel Valley and tries to save the local economy.


Saturday, October 11, 2008

Blackberry Pearl 8120 Linux Ubuntu 8.04 Tethering

Here is what was needed:

1) Download these debs:

charles@socalwifi:~/Desktop$ ls *.deb
barry-util_0.14-0_i386.deb
libbarry0_0.14-0_i386.deb
libboost-serialization1.34.1_1.34.1-4ubuntu3_i386.deb
charles@socalwifi:~/Desktop$

from http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ndprojects/Ubuntu804/

Update. This gave me a connection time of about 10 minutes. I am now using the CVS version and it's rock solid. I recommend running CVS and upgrading to 0.15 when it's released.

2) as root: echo *$'\t'*$'\t'\"\" >> /etc/ppp/chap-secrets

3) unplug blackberry from usb

4) plug blackberry into usb

5) as root run "pppd call barry-tmobileus"

Thanks to Mike Fedyk for these instructions. Worked great out of the box. Just don't try to run it while on the phone.

Small caveat: Only worked for about 10 minutes then the phone crashed. I sent a twitter, an e-mail and used skype (with a 3 person conference call)

I'm running 4.3.0.115 (platform 2.6.0.64) firmware on a Blackberry 8120 and my carrier is T-mobile. This lasts longer then Mike who has a Blackberry Pearl 8100 with an earlier version of the firmware.


Output from a successful connection (the one I did just before editing this blog post as a matter of fact):

root@socalwifi:~# pppd call barry-tmobileus
Initializing
Serial connection established.
using channel 12
Using interface ppp0
Connect: ppp0 <--> /dev/pts/0
sent [LCP ConfReq id=0x1 ]
rcvd [LCP ConfReq id=0x0 ]
sent [LCP ConfAck id=0x0 ]
rcvd [LCP ConfAck id=0x1 ]
sent [PAP AuthReq id=0x1 user="socalwifi" password=]
rcvd [PAP AuthAck id=0x1]
PAP authentication succeeded
sent [CCP ConfReq id=0x1 ]
sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x1 ]
rcvd [LCP ProtRej id=0x1 80 fd 01 01 00 0f 1a 04 78 00 18 04 78 00 15 03 2f]
Protocol-Reject for 'Compression Control Protocol' (0x80fd) received
rcvd [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 ]
sent [IPCP ConfAck id=0x2 ]
rcvd [IPCP ConfNak id=0x1 ]
sent [IPCP ConfReq id=0x2 ]
rcvd [IPCP ConfAck id=0x2 ]
Cannot determine ethernet address for proxy ARP
local IP address 25.228.209.179
remote IP address 169.254.1.1
primary DNS address 66.94.9.120
secondary DNS address 66.94.25.120
Script /etc/ppp/ip-up started (pid 3607)
Script /etc/ppp/ip-up finished (pid 3607), status = 0x0

4 comments:

ghjghj said...

Try upgrading your OS on your blackberry , im sure it will work alot better with the 4.5 OS out for the pearls now , i have an 8130 :)

Anonymous said...

I just went through your files and was unable to find what you listed. I have a T-mobile Blackberry 8120, and I would love to use it as a modem for Ubuntu. What's new?

Anonymous said...

Charles, I was excited to see your post because I have been trying to get my Blackberry tethered through Ubuntu 8.04 for awhile. I've used my XP VM in Virtualbox tether as a workaround.

So my BB is a Pearl 8120, also 4.3 OS with T-Mobile. I followed your steps, it looks like it connects...but still doesn't work.

Did you disable your other interfaces eth0 etc. before connecting?

Cool blog btw!

Anonymous said...

Darow,

Thanks for the comment! :)

Can you post your ppp logs, your ifconfig output and your netstat -rn output?

I didn't have to disable any interfaces to get it working. Also it won't work while on the phone.