How to OpenBSD with Huawei E1750 UMTS

2 minutes read
Infrastructure

Getting my OpenBSD (4.8) box to talk an Huawei E1750 USB UMTS Stick as a backup solution turned out to be not very straight forward, so in case you are in a similar situation…

Have a look at man umsm to see which devices are supported by OpenBSD.

The UMTS (USB)-Sticks are registered as /dev/cuaUX, where X is the number of your device… You’ll need userland pppd to connect. Place your peer configuration in /etc/ppp/peers/o2 for example:

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cuaU0
connect /etc/ppp/connect.o2
disconnect /etc/ppp/disconnect.o2
nocrtscts
xonxoff
#:0.0.0.2 because 0.0.0.1 is the alias for my DSL default gateway
:0.0.0.2
noipdefault
ipcp-accept-local
defaultroute
novj
nobsdcomp
novjccomp
nopcomp
noaccomp
noauth
nomagic
persist

You’ll also need Chat scripts to connect and disconnect the connection. Note that you’ll need to at least adjust /etc/ppp/connect.o2 to suit your provider: 

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#!/bin/sh
chat -vs 
 ABORT 'NO CARRIER' 
 ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' 
 ABORT ERROR 
 ABORT 'NO ANSWER' 
 ABORT BUSY '' 
 at OK 
 atz OK 
 # uncomment the following if your SIM is PIN protected
 # and replace **** with your PIN
 #at+cpin=**** OK 
 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","pinternet.interkom.de"' OK
 'atdt*99***1#' CONNECT

And /etc/ppp/disconnect.o2 looks like: 

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#!/bin/sh
chat -vs 
 ABORT 'NO CARRIER' 
 ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' 
 ABORT ERROR 
 ABORT 'NO ANSWER' 
 ABORT BUSY '' 
 'K' '' '+++ATH'

Now make sure ppp0 is initialized on startup… 

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touch /etc/hostname.ppp0
sh /etc/netstart ppp0

… and to connect simply run pppd call o2 and pkill pppd to disconnect. Run ifconfig ppp0 to see if your connection is up and running: 

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ppp0: flags=8051<UP,POINTOPOINT,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
    priority: 0
    groups: ppp egress
    inet 10.150.81.109 --> 0.0.0.2 netmask 0xfffffffc

Next post will be about auto fail-over between this and my regular DSL connection.

How-To • openbsd • umts