How to get Verizon 4G wireless working again?

English Hardware
1

I had a system crash, which I brought on myself, The main result of which was that a couple of log files in /var/log went viral and filled up the root partition. Linux doesn’t work very well that way.

After finding the offenders and fixing that, it seems everything is working OK, except that my Verizon wireless connection has quit working entirely. When I first got it in the store it didn’t immediately work, but I didn’t worry about that. When I got home I hooked the wired network, tried again and was asked to install snmppp something or other. I did and it pretty much set itself up. I don’t remember much except it was very easy and just worked.

Now, I don’t know where to start looking. The notebook is an Asus X54H, the wireless is a USB51L wireless dongle. Operating system is 12.1. Looking in hardware info, the dongle is recognized, but not in YAST Network Settings. in KDE Settings, wireless and mobile broadband are grayed out in network settings.

Any ideas where to start looking?

2

in KDE Settings, wireless and mobile broadband are grayed out in network settings.

From your description, the wireless and 4G device appear to be disabled. Open a terminal window and run

/usr/sbin/rfkill list

For reference, you can see all my wireless devices are enabled

0: hp-wifi: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no
1: hp-bluetooth: Bluetooth
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no
2: hp-wwan: Wireless WAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no
4: phy0: Wireless LAN
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no
6: hci0: Bluetooth
        Soft blocked: no
        Hard blocked: no

If the device in question is only ‘soft-blocked’, you can run the following command to enable if necessary

sudo /usr/sbin/rfkill unblock <number>

See how that goes.

(BTW, ‘hard-blocking’ is usually due to a physical switch or similar, but probably not relevant for your USB device ).

3

Already did that. Three connections are shown, eth0, loopback & wlan0. However, wlan0 is for a pcie wireless in the notebook, an AR9285 adapter. There is no entry for the USB dongle.

4

Already did that. Three connections are shown, eth0, loopback & wlan0. However, wlan0 is for a pcie wireless in the notebook, an AR9285 adapter.

Okay, well you didn’t say, so we’re left to guess :slight_smile:

So, the next step is plug in your USB device, open a terminal window, and execute

dmesg|tail

What (if anything) is reported?

5

Boy, that is an esoteric command. And I must say the response means nothing to me. Usually I can get at least something from the commands I am told to run here.

The output is:

BobTheBull@linux-6ul4:/data1> dmesg|tail
   44.095063] ata2.00: status: { DRDY }
   44.095067] ata2: hard resetting link
   44.818791] ata2: SATA link up 1.5 Gbps (SStatus 113 SControl 300)
   44.821166] ata2.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:06:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) succeeded
   44.821171] ata2.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered out
   44.825576] ata2.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:06:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) succeeded
   44.825580] ata2.00: ACPI cmd ef/10:03:00:00:00:a0 (SET FEATURES) filtered out
   44.827409] ata2.00: configured for UDMA/100
   44.840758] ata2: EH complete
   60.178070] ADDRCONF(NETDEV_UP): wlan0: link is not ready
6

Boy, that is an esoteric command. And I must say the response means nothing to me. Usually I can get at least something from the commands I am told to run here.

The dmesg command is used to view the kernel messages that are of interest. The pipe and tail command are just used to give us the last messages, that may be associated with an event like plugging in your hardware. For more info

man dmesg

and this for an explanation on pipes
All about pipes, by The Linux Information Project (LINFO)

Nothing in that output pertains to your 4G dongle. We need to at least know the chipset details. Plug it in again, and post the output from

lsusb
7

And thank you for that excellent explanation of the command usage. The one thing I do understand out of that is pipe; I did work with some Unix systems back in the 80’s. But I will follow the link at some time to see if I can learn more.

That said, the output is:

BobTheBull@linux-6ul4:/data1> lsusb
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 002 Device 002: ID 8087:0024 Intel Corp. Integrated Rate Matching Hub
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 058f:a014 Alcor Micro Corp. 
Bus 002 Device 003: ID 045e:00cb Microsoft Corp. Basic Optical Mouse v2.0
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0003 Linux Foundation 3.0 root hub
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 1410:b001 Novatel Wireless

The Novatel Wireless is the device I am trying to get working.

I am feeling really tired and am going to bed now. I do appreciate all the timely responses, and will check in again before going to work, but will not likely be able to go much further until after work, CST time, tomorrow.

8

I’m attaching this link to an Ubuntu bug report discussing the Verizon Wireless USB551L 4G Wireless Card:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/886130

This may (or may not) be relevant to your situation. It appears as if the device needs to be in the correct state before it will be recognised as a NIC correctly (supported by the cdc_ether kernel module).

You haven’t shared with us if anything special was ever needed to get this device up and running (beyond network manager configuration).

9

I did share that, in the very first post. I did not do anything special. In fact, it was so easy & automatic I was surprised.

10

Without knowing the specifics myself, did it ever get initialised (the first time perhaps) in a windows environment? When all is well, you should be presented with an additional ethernet interface, which can the be detected and configured via the network manager. Do you see another interface created when it is plugged in?

/sbin/ifconfig

I would be surprised though, because the dmesg results you posted earlier, didn’t suggest it was being handled by cdc_ether. I guess you could try modprobing it manually.

modprobe cdc_ether

then check if the interface exists again, although I’m not sure this will be sufficient on its own, if it wasn’t present prior to this manual step.

The bug report discusses users experiencing similar problems, and having to activate the device via its serial interface (which can also be activated), and parsing some initialization strings, before being able to connect. (Post 42 of that thread for example).

11

No, did not get initialized on Windows first. I bought the thing in a Verizon store, where it was unpacked from all that plastic. The salesman knew nothing of linux, so I plugged it in, told smpppd needed to be installed and asked for the SuSE install DVD. I didn’t have it, so I told the salesman not to worry, I would play with it when I got home. When I got home I plugged in the home net and fired it up. Again was told to install smpppd, which it found via internet; said yes and it was installed and the dongle worked. I presume somewhere I told it to use Verizon wireless, although I don’t distinctly remember. All I do remember was that it went very smoothly and it worked. And kept working very well until I hosed my SuSE OS.

After that I did use it in Win7, which came on the notebook, for work purposes, although it didn’t work nearly as well. Had to restart it every time lid was opened and closed, and would sometimes suddenly quit working and only a reboot would get it to work again. And, btw, while Win7 may be a big improvement over XP it’s still a ptia to use.

So, finally got around to fixing SuSE, but dongle no work, which is why we’re here.

Right now rfkill is reporting phy0: wireless lan & asus-wlan: wireless lan, no blocks on either. ifconfig shows eth0, lo, & wlan0, which YaST network settings says is the Asus wlan pcie adapter. I assume by check after modprobe you mean run ifconfig again, which shows no change. Check of USB devices shows the Novatel adapter.

When I boot up with the dongle attached, it starts flashing green/blue, then goes to solid blue. This indicates it has found a 4G connection. It does not however start flashing blue, which indicates data transmission. And, I still have the wireless tabs in network config grayed out. This tells me the dongle is working as a USB device, but is not being recognized as a network device. And, smpppd is shown as running.

Any clue how to get it recognized as a network device?

12

Problem solved?

I got tired of my $50/mos Vwerizon wireless not working and got VZ TS on the phone. We apparently got it working again by uninstalling the Win7 vz software & drivers & reinstalling the latest versions from their website. That seems to have done the trick. before that did try to reset the sim by removing and reinstalling, although that did not fix the problems in windows.

So after watching it work in windows for a while I decided on a whim to try SuSE again. Well, lo and behold, it works! In fact, I am replying on my notebook. all my tabs from before are working. Again, I didn’t do anything special in SuSE to get it working. So, apparently it has to work in windows before it will work in linux. Novatel does say on their website it must be activated in windows before using in linux.

At any rate, whoohoo! You have no idea how good this is after all that time futzing around with windows.

Thanks for all the help, and my apologies for putting you to so much trouble when there never was a problem with my linux to begin with. That does make it hard to fix.