Orange GPRS on SPV C550

Recently I impressed my boss by getting the company Motorola RAZR support phones to connect to Orange GPRS in about 10 seconds flat with the help of google and this script (sorry, can’t find the site it came from now, let me know if you can [dear reader])

#!/bin/bash

/usr/sbin/pppd connect ‘/usr/sbin/chat -v ABORT "NO CARRIER" "" "AT&F" OK "AT+CGDCONT=1,\"IP\",\"orangeinternet\"" OK "ATDT*99#" CONNECT’ \
/dev/ttyACM0 115200 defaultroute crtscts noauth deflate 0 asyncmap 0 mtu 1500 mru 1500 noipdefault idle 600


anyway, I thought some variant of this would work on my SPV C550, but it was hell!

Finally, thanks to Mikko Rapeli and his SPV specific notes I came up with this variation in my /etc/rc.local (bootup hacks)

rmmod usbserial
modprobe usbserial vendor=0×0bb4 product=0×00cf

Now, I just use the Applications/Modem applet on my SPV to enable USB modem before plugging it in, and I have a modem on /dev/ttyS0

Mikko’s pages were somewhat helpful and so was Paul Perkins but the main gotcha with this SPV is that it needs to login, it really needs to, it goes on begging until it is allowed to, so the username is: user and the password is: pass.

It was only reading pppd man page and thinking about Paul’s chap-secrets (which everyone else ignored) that tipped me to this, so I used Mikko’s gprs config but changed the username in the /etc/ppp/peers/gprs file to: user and turned on noauth (which is about the remote called end authenticating back to the caller).

My /etc/ppp/chap-secrets entry looks like this:
"user" * "pass" *

and all’s well with the world.

And why does Ubuntu dialup network configuration seem worse than for SCO 3.2v4.2?

There’s no need for custom dialup scripts for most things these days, yeah a chat connect/disconnect script might be needed for a specific modem type, but  after that all modems follow the same patterns; a couple of init strings, a number to dial, and then a username or password and some ppp options for the data connection.

So what's with ubuntu’s ppp0 (and only ppp0) tricks?