shapeshifter.se

I’ve been hacking on a driver for Option GlobeSurfer iCON 7.2 S HSDPA/3G USB cards (and more or less all newer Option cards) for a few days now and I just reached a major milestone. A successful connection!

The driver is called hso for now (same name as the linux driver). The card is not a “normal” 3G-modem in the sense that it’s not simply a serial-over-USB card. Instead it has several serial channels that accept the normal AT interface (signal strength, SMS, etc) and in addition to that a IP packet interface to which one reads and writes raw IP packets. The card is exposed through a simulated Ethernet device.

hso0: flags=1088c3<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,NOARP,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST,NEEDSGIANT>
   metric 0 mtu 1500
        ether 40:0c:e3:69:11:00
        inet 83.178.12.92 netmask 0xffffffff broadcast 83.178.12.92
        inet6 fe80::420c:e3ff:fe69:1100%hso0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x5

Currently it’s a bit annoying to setup a connection as it requires that one first opens a serial channels and issue AT_OWANCALL to create a connection and AT_OWANDATA to get the ip-address and nameservers and then manually configure the interface. It would be nice if this could be automated by the driver with the interface is brought up, however that would require the driver (and thus kernel) itself to read from its own serial channel…bit hackish but maybe it works

Finally, the output from the very first connections. This is a ping from my workstation to the computer connected through the card.

fli@nexus> ping 83.178.12.92
PING 83.178.12.92 (83.178.12.92): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 83.178.12.92: icmp_seq=0 ttl=56 time=446.203 ms
64 bytes from 83.178.12.92: icmp_seq=1 ttl=56 time=332.321 ms

And this is from the computer connected with the card

fli@genesis> ping ping.sunet.se
PING ping.sunet.se (192.36.125.18): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 192.36.125.18: icmp_seq=0 ttl=248 time=287.708 ms

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 8th, 2008 at 11:00 pm and is filed under FreeBSD. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.