inbound connection problem on huawei k3765

English Network/Internet
1

hi,

i’ve been using gnu/linux since 1999, so i guess i’m an experienced user. but this problem has completely flummoxed me.

last week i got this vodafone 3g connection on their huawei k3765 usb dongle. before this, i was using an ev-do connection on a zte dongle.

setting it up was a breeze, and it’s giving good speeds. i have no reason to complain, except inbound connections don’t work.

when i use the ev-do connection, inbound connections are successful. when i use the 3g connection, they fail.

i thought it was a firewall issue. so i tinkered with it using yast. when that didn’t work, i completely disabled the SuSEfirewall services in the runlevel editor, and rebooted. when the system came back up, ‘rcSuSEfirewall status’ returned ‘unused’, and ‘iptables-save’ returned a blank output.

i started the connection and then checked with ‘iptables-save’ again, and it was still blank.

however, inbound connections still didn’t work. i couldn’t ssh into my box, or even ping it. azureus showed ‘nat error’.

i thought maybe it had something to do with qinternet and smpppd. so i disabled those, and used wvdial instead.

still nothing.

i completely removed the leftover ev-do configs from the system, and deleted the corresponding interface in /etc/sysconfig/network/SuSEfirewall.

nothing.

so perhaps it is a hardware issue? maybe vodafone sold me a lemon? or maybe they aren’t forwarding certain ports?

no, because when i used the same modem on my laptop running ubuntu 10.04, IT WORKED BEAUTIFULLY!

azureus worked, ssh worked, everything worked.

i’m at my wit’s end. please advise.

thanks in advance.

2

tathagatabanerjee, I looked up Ubuntu 10.04 and it says it uses kernel 2.6.32, but I missed what version of openSUSE that you are using. Most often, direct hardware support is built into the kernel but apparently you can also have regression issues appear with newer kernels and older hardware. No way I can know for sure but to compare the different apples (Linux distros and kernel versions) you are using.

Thank You,

3

dear jdmcdaniel3,

thanks for your interest. i’m using OpenSuSE 11.4 on my box.

(i hope you don’t mind my writing OpenSuSE this way; this is how i always wrote it, and don’t want to change)

is my modem old hardware? vodafone is pushing it as the latest and greatest here (india).

  • t.
4

dear jdmcdaniel3,

thanks for your interest. i’m using OpenSuSE 11.4 on my box.

(i hope you don’t mind my writing OpenSuSE this way; this is how i always wrote it, and don’t want to change)

is my modem old hardware? vodafone is pushing it as the latest and greatest here (india).

  • t.
    I am no longer much of an expert with modems per say. It is curios it works OK with an older kernel version and makes you wonder if the issue is something else. I guess I might search the Internet on the new modem with Linux and see if anything pops up. It is possible to upgrade your kernel version to 2.6.38.2 to see if that might help, but I don’t know why it is not working in openSUSE 11.4.

Thank You,

5

yes, exactly. i don’t know if it’s a kernel issue at all, but i can’t think of any other possibility. i sifted the internet to the limits of my google-fu, and got nothing. please let me know if you meet greater success. i tried to find out if these usb modems have an internal http page with config options, like many routers do. couldn’t find any reference.

well i’m using the default kernel in OpenSuSE 11.4, which is ‘2.6.37.1-1.2-desktop’. and unless it is certain that there have been significant improvements in the networking code or dongle-handling code since that version, i wouldn’t like to screw with the kernel. but if you have specific knowledge, please share with me.

thank you.

6

did another little experiment.

instead of using the modem directly on my ubuntu laptop, i used the OpenSuSE system as my laptop’s gateway.

unsurprisingly, this time azureus fails to work on the laptop too.

i don’t know what this proves, or if it proves anything at all, but thought i’d just mention it!

  • t.