Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Oh and the gateway on the laptop is 10.176.159.1

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Joikuspot works perfectly with the custom kernel for me.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Ah yes, the hex-encoding is handled by the backend automatically so the the wep key you input just the "password", it's also automatically zero-padded to the correct size.

@istrike the most interesting problem so far, congrats (?) in terminal as root (after starting the backend and connecting your laptop) list the iptables rules, routing table and kernel ip_forward setting

On the laptop run "traceroute -n 8.8.8.8" (note I'm not sure if -n [do not resolve DNS names] is valid option in windows traceroute).

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Sweet! I also once won a no prize through Marvel comics. I knew that one day I would be special again! I will run the commands and list the results shortly.

PS - this is an awesome community. The numbskulls at .....spot don't even reply to emails that say hey my package never downloaded. 3 days and counting. You guys are the best!

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Hi, I was a somehow happy user of Mobile Hotspot but now with actually longer time use, I'm seeing repeatedly reliability problems. The whole solution is not stable, at least not on my N900.

Let me explain. After an undetermined amount of time (each time different) the Wifi connection seems to go down. Then my laptops (Ubuntu 9.10 and Win XP) loose the connection. It seems the Wifi is coming up again very quickly but the end-to-end connection to the Internet via 3g is not there anymore. Sometimes plain ping works fine, nslookup as well but any longer burst of traffic, such as web page loading cause a 'connect reset while loading' message in my browser. VPN clients have a similar behaviour : the first messages (probably a ping) goes through, only when the VPN channel negotiation gets busier by sending/receiving more packets, then the VPN client reports connection problems.

This behaviour doesn't resolve itself, shutting down Mobile Hotspot and restarting doesn't fix it. 3G datatraffic from N900 to/from the Internet is always working.

Sometime the Mobile Hotspot application hangs, doesn't want to leave and complains 'internet connection failed', while I'm properly connected.

The phone is also getting quite warm, allthough the cpu is not really loaded, 10 to 20 % according to conky.

Kernel is Titan's power25, I've tried on stock settings, on XLV and on ideal settings, happens with all of them.

Most of the times I can get Mobile Hotspot working after restarting my handset but not always.

Did anyone see this behavior before ? Is there any debug info I can give/collect during the problem ? I checked dmesg but I couldn't see anything obvious.

I tried removing Mobile Hotspot and reinstalling but to no availability.

Thanks.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

How your mobile provider reacts to tethering ? they might do some "interesting" traffick shaping aka "network management" if they decide someone is abusing the connection. (there are ways to determine number of devices behind NAT and even fingerprint the operating systems, I don't think Linux kernel has the kind of TCP scrubbing support that OpenBSD has to counter these techniques)

Does rebooting the whole N900 help ? (ah, answered below, not always, hmm.. this might suggest "network management")

Get into habit of starting mobilehotspot (frontend) via terminal, this way you can see debug output in case of trouble.

The GSM radio does not use main CPU but it does use power, the more data you push through it the more power it uses.

[QUOTE=Netweaver;624540]
Kernel is Titan's power25, I've tried on stock settings, on XLV and on ideal settings, happens with all of them.


The hotspot itself is quite trivial, all the hard work is done by the kernel. if it refuses to start/stop properly after checking the errors in the frontend terminal window (if you started via terminal) you can try running "sudo /usr/sbin/mobilehotspot_backend start" (or stop) via terminal to see the backend debug messages.

While "the hotspot is running" (ie kernel is configured to do the hard work) it's a bit difficult to say "do this" to debug (at least I can't think of anything now), it just takes some experience to look at the situation and then come up with something to test and work forward from there.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

hmmm just a quick note. since the last update all my devices are unable to geht a connection to the N900. all of them see the adhoc network, but neither my computer nor my iPod Touch can connect to it :-(

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Did you perhaps enabled WEP to test it and forgot it on ? As said earlier the "hotspot" is actually jus a convinient way to switch network connection and configure kernel to do NAT, all the hard work is done by the kernel.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

i wanted to use it, but since i didn't kew the length right of the WEP keys and if my other devices are able to handle it the same way (some devices don't like ASCII keys, other don't like HEX keys), i didn't.

and the GUI shows me that "Encryption None" and None is grey... so it should be off.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

There is no difference in ascii or hex keys (other than the way you input them), the hotspot UI always takes "ascii" key (as in: you input the key bytes as is and hex-encoding is done by the backend script when it passes they key to iwconfig), it will also automatically 0-pad/limit the key to correct size.

It would seem that WEP is off.

Try running "sudo /usr/sbin/mobilehotspot_backend start" manually in terminal and post the output, it will show for example the exact commands used to configure kernel etc.