Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

That's why I'm asking the question. If I knew the answer I wouldn't be asking. Joikuspot was working fine, the next day I installed Mobile Hotspot and auto-disconnect and it stopped working. Both were immediately removed and Joikuspot re-installed and now I have not been able to get it working since. I don't know what could have screwed things up.

As for the kernel comment I have no idea what if anything the kernel has to do with it. Someone gave a suggestion to check it and I did. I'm open to all suggestions.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

I didn't know I had installed a titan kernel. I tried it and it didn't make any difference. I'll probably just reflash my phone and start from scratch.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Ok, this explains a lot. Titans kernel got installed because mobilehotspot depends on kernel-feature-netfilter (which titans kernel provides). Reinstall stock kernel and you should be good to go (uninstalling just mobilehotspot will not uninstall titans kernel and I'm not 100% titans kernel automatically reflashes stock kernel after uninstall [which would be kinda smart to do]).

I kinda suppose (yes, supposion is the mother of all f*ckups) that people testing stuff from extras-devel seeing the package description (where it's stated that a custom kernel is required and might be installed automatically) know what it means.

edit: Do you mean reflashing stock kernel made no difference to Joikuspot ? Interesting but can't really help with that.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Just wanted to tell how impressed I am. I was a more-or-less happy user from Joikuspot. There were issues with not connection linux boxes, extensive CPU usage (far more than seemed needed, even in the lo-fi client screen) but all got worse during my OC kernel trials.

I couldn't correctly get it to run anymore. So I decided to give mobilehotspot a chance and I must say : amazing. very little config (just enough for me), using the latest Titan kernel (power25) and it just works.

Very low overhead, no compatibility issues so far (eg. DHCP server not working), straight connection from my linux box ... Only thing I might like is a sort of 'connected clients' screen, to monitor a bit what's happening. low-fi is ok, CPU cycles sometimes quite scarce :)

Anyway, one word : super !! I don't think I'll go back to try to get Joikuspot working again unless I REALLY have to ... I just hope whenever PR1.2 comes out, Titan will update his kernel ASAP. I'm getting addicted to these enhanced community kernels :)

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

AFAIK Titan's Kernel is already based on PR1.2 source tree so it's PR1.2 kernel with enhancements.

EDIT: My only concern is that WEP seems to always be off even if I activate it via the frontend. If someone have a solution for that, I'll be glad to read it.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Post screenshots of the config (remember to change the key to something to style of "example" first), then if you know how to read gconf data from the python shell read values

/apps/mobilehotspot/encryption_algo
/apps/mobilehotspot/encryption_key

and post them.

Then from terminal run hotspot_backend manually (via sudo) and post output.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Here is what I get:
The strange part is that 'iwconfig wlan0 key restricted' is executed (I verified it wasn't here for an open connection)

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

@rambo: this is a simple bug in helpers.hex_encode… there is
"for char in output_str:" when is should say "for char in input_str:"

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Figured as much as soon as I saw that 'iwconfig wlan0 key restricted' , but I'm sure I fixed that typo "somewhere", it seems I never committed that change...

I'll be rolling a new package later today, meanwhile get r168 of helpers.py and overwrite the old one (or just use vi to fix that line...)

Edit: package built by autobuilder has landed to the repo.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

The "hudge cpu consumption" complaints of Joiku makes me think that they do screen updates even when background which would be a monumental mistake, of course doing NAT in userspace is an overhead but I have no idea of the magnitude (yet... we'll be using weks approach for that with mobilehotspot soonish)

I have been thinking about that too and maybe some sort of simple data counter. But since both of those you can check from the terminal (ifconfig and iwconfig are your friends) if you're really interested I think I won't be adding them anytime soon (feel free to submit patches though).

Another idea I have floated around in the back of my head would be to add a led-pattern that the hotspot backend would use when active (this is one reason why I wrote mceledpattern)

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Thanks rambo. It works now.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

I am having some trouble setting this up. I am running titans kernel. The mobile hotspot app seems to run and my computer connects but no Internet. Here is the error I get when I run the backend from the command line:

ERROR:dbus.proxies:Introspect error on :1.84:/com/nokia/icd2: dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unsupported interface or method

Any help is appreciated.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

I re-installed the stock kernel and my whole system started having serious issues. Things started slowing down to the point where it was unusable. Since then I have re-flashed and its back to normal.

So I have a few questions regarding Mobile Hotspot.

a) What kind of performance are you guys getting? Is it the same as tethered? Right now T-Mobile gives me 4.5 Mb/s (speedtest on phone and tethered to laptop) but I get no more than 1.2 Mb/s using Joikuspot. Can I get close to tethered speeds using Mobile hotspot?

b) When you access the internet using the phone, does that affect your connected speed from laptop? With Joikuspot when the phone accesses the internet (Gpodder getting feeds) my laptop becomes essentially unresponsive and connectivity returns after Gpodder stops retrieving feeds

c) How hot does the phone get? My phone gets hot enough so that I have to stop the app after 15 minutes. Once I restart Joiku I get connectivity. I don't know if it's a memory leak issue or a heat issue but I find I need to stop every once in a while.

d) Does anyone have Mobile Hotspot and overclocking? I'd like to get up to 850 MHz but with Joikuspot I feel like I'll def. fry my phone.

e) Do you know if Mobile Hotspot will support infrastructure mode eventually?

Sorry for all of the questions. I don't mind spending money but if Mobile Hotspot is better, I'm happy to load that instead. Thanks.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Post full output, that is just a complaint from DBUS since IcD2 does not support introspection (grr!) and is not the source of the problem.

I don't know of the magnitudes (have not made measurements) but tethering via cable is always going to have less overhead and thus will always be faster. How much this in practise and whether it's worth fiddling with the cable? As usual: "it depends".

Of course more users on the network affect speeds for everyone, I have not run any tests to see if the device local processes have some sort of priority (in practise they might since they're not going through the NAT).

However both hotspot and titans kernel have QoS compiled in so if you want to tweak things grab iproute2 and start reading lartc. Wondershaper is also might usefull.

The reason hotspot does not use wondershaper (or similar techniques) by default is that I have no idea how to reliably determine the connection speed (without doing some sort of active speed-tests which have their own problems).

People have reported the phone barely getting warm even after long use.

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...2&postcount=22 would suggest that it should be safe (as far as the hotspot is concerned [it it does not lock you to high frequency or anything])

If it's possible at all then eventually it will happen, however it might take a long while for this eventuality to happen.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Rambo, thanks for the thorough reply. One last noob question. Last week when I saw Mobile Hotspot come up in the App manager I downloaded and installed. I didn't find this thread until later. I know the steps listed on page 1 of this thread has all of the instructions to install dependencies and etc. If I install through apps manager will it include all dependencies? Just want to make sure I'm doing this right. I also assume that I have to uninstall Joiku as well.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Application manager will (in theory) install all the dependencies, including a kernel that supports NAT. You will need to reboot after installing if you were not running a NAT-kernel before installing mobilehotspot.

I find it interesting that you have extras-devel enabled on your device as routine (I enable it on mine only when I wish to test something from there and disable it afterwards, extras-testing I keep enabled all the time...). Of course some people do, nothing wrong with that since you're ready to reflash whenever needed.

Joiku might not work with the custom kernel but I see no reason why it would conflict by just being installed on the system.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

@Rambo: Thanks for following up!

Here you go...

/home/user # /usr/sbin/mobilehotspot_backend start ; echo $?DEBUG: executing uname -r
DEBUG-read_previous_state: setting state key 'gconf' to value: {'wlan_search_interval': 0}
DEBUG-read_previous_state: setting state key 'kernel' to value: {'loaded_modules': {'x_tables': False, 'nf_nat': True, 'nf_conntrack': True, 'ipt_MASQUERADE': True, 'nf_conntrack_ipv4': True, 'ip_tables': False, 'iptable_nat': True, 'nf_defrag_ipv4': True}}
DEBUG-read_previous_state: setting state key 'icd' to value: {'old_connection_type': 'GPRS', 'old_connection_name': '5e76c352-7e2d-4884-88ec-c004c4745f90'}
DEBUG: executing lsmod
DEBUG: executing insmod /lib/modules/2.6.28.10power-omap1/nf_conntrack.ko
DEBUG: executing lsmod
DEBUG: executing insmod /lib/modules/2.6.28.10power-omap1/nf_defrag_ipv4.ko
DEBUG: executing lsmod
DEBUG: executing insmod /lib/modules/2.6.28.10power-omap1/nf_conntrack_ipv4.ko
DEBUG: executing lsmod
DEBUG: executing insmod /lib/modules/2.6.28.10power-omap1/x_tables.ko
DEBUG: executing lsmod
DEBUG: executing insmod /lib/modules/2.6.28.10power-omap1/ip_tables.ko
DEBUG: executing lsmod
DEBUG: executing insmod /lib/modules/2.6.28.10power-omap1/nf_nat.ko
DEBUG: executing lsmod
DEBUG: executing insmod /lib/modules/2.6.28.10power-omap1/iptable_nat.ko
DEBUG: executing lsmod
DEBUG: executing insmod /lib/modules/2.6.28.10power-omap1/ipt_MASQUERADE.ko
ERROR:dbus.proxies:Introspect error on :1.83:/com/nokia/icd2: dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NotSupported: Unsupported interface or method
icd2_state_listener got args:

(dbus.String(u''), dbus.UInt32(0L), dbus.String(u''), dbus.String(u'GPRS'), dbus.UInt32(83886080L), dbus.ByteArray('5e76c352-7e2d-4884-88ec-c004c4745f90\x00'), dbus.String(u''), dbus.UInt32(2L))
state['icd']:

{'old_connection_type': 'GPRS', 'old_connection_name': '5e76c352-7e2d-4884-88ec-c004c4745f90'}
DEBUG: executing ifconfig wlan0 down
DEBUG: executing iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc
DEBUG: executing ifconfig wlan0 up
DEBUG: executing iwconfig wlan0 key 5gfuygcgutd564562 restricted
DEBUG: executing iwconfig wlan0 essid "MobileHotSpot"
DEBUG: executing ifconfig wlan0 10.176.159.1 netmask 255.255.255.0 up
DEBUG: executing /usr/sbin/dnsmasq -i wlan0 -a 10.176.159.1 -I lo -z -x /var/run/dnsmasq.wlan0.pid --dhcp-range=10.176.159.10,10.176.159.100,6h --dhcp-option=3,10.176.159.1 --dhcp-option=6,10.176.159.1
DEBUG: executing iptables --flush
DEBUG: executing iptables --flush -t nat
DEBUG: executing iptables -P FORWARD ACCEPT
DEBUG: executing iptables -P INPUT ACCEPT
DEBUG: executing iptables -P OUTPUT ACCEPT
DEBUG: executing iptables --table nat --append POSTROUTING --out-interface gprs0 -j MASQUERADE
0

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Well.. for me the mobile hotspot app works great!
thank you guys! great work!

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

I think I have the same issue... just FYI.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...3&postcount=94 (first on the list of replies)

Forgot to say that you should change the WEP (if using) key first, I hope you're not using that anywhere else.

The backend starts fine as far as the program itself is concerned (exit code 0), what is the problem ?

1. Can you connect to the Ad-Hoc network at all, what happens if you disable WEP ?
2. Do you get IP-address automatically ? If you do can you ping the N900 (10.176.159.1 in your case)
3. If you do not get IP automatically can you set one manually and then ping the N900 (10.176.159.1 is N900 ip, use it as gateway, use 10.176.159.5 as your manual IP [obviously the netmask is /24 or 255.255.255.0])

I have sometimes seen it happen (with my Mac laptop) that things seem to go fine but I simply cannot ping the N900 no matter what I do. I have no idea so far as to why this would happen.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Ok, I got it to work on a windows 7 notebook without WEP. With WEP it would connect, but it couldn't resolve the internet connection. It looks like it still has the auto-assigned IP address (169.254.*). Could this be a mismatch with WEP key using hex characters, but ascii characters on the other? My WEP key is all hex characters.

Testing to continue...

EDIT: ok, I got WEP to work. I first changed my key to have non-hex characters ("dog"), but it filled it to be "dog00". So I tried "doggy", and it worked fine. It seems that there is an issue if you use hex-only characters, perhaps.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

@Rambo - naaahhh the key was a random thing added messing around with this. I changed it anyways just incase.

Yeah I can see the ad-hoc network and also the laptop does snag ip addresses and get full connection but cannot get on the Internet. Also I disabled the WEP altogether and again it grabs an ip but no Internet.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

try pinging a domain-name (eg. www.google.com) and an IP (eg. 8.8.8.8) from the n900 and from your laptop. which of the four pings succeeds?

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

The 2 from the n900 pinged with no problemo. The ones from the laptop failed.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Thanks for the clarification. Yeah, its probably not a good idea. I go back and forth. Maybe I should be more conserative.

From what I can tell Joikuspot doesn't work with the new kernel. At least, it didn't work for me. Thanks again.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

I had the same problem and ended up re-flashing. I couldn't even ping the phone, much less pass traffic through it.

Does anyone know how to snoop an interface? Is tcpdump the equivalent in Lunix land? If we can see packets coming in the wifi interface then at least we could know if its NAT issue or something like that, vs. connectivity.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

ok… but you CAN ping your n900 from the laptop? That would be strange…
How are you sure your laptop gets a correct IP? What is the IP it gets, and what are gateway and subnetmask?

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

are you sure it doesn't work with the kernel-power kernel?
in more recent versions I have build the kernel module for it.
if necessary, "modprobe JoikuSpot_Bouncer" as root should load it.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

I don't know the specific issues. When I uninstalled mobile hotspot it didn't uninstall the kernel and I didn't realize that. When I had backed up myphone pre-flash it had the kernel in it so when after I flashed everything and did a restore Joikuspot and still didn't work. I tried the command to re-load the old kernel and then everything went downhill. No idea why. Phone so unbearably slow it was unusable.

I re-flashed again with everything the same except I didn't restore the custom kernel and now it works fine with Joiku. There may have been other dependencies but that was what fixed it for me.

Re: N900 as a Wifi Hotspot, part 2
 

Ok sorry about the delay was headed home from work and thank you all thus far.

@ hcm: Yes I can ping the n900 from my laptop. Windows 7 shows IPv4 and IPv6 no internet access and no network access. It also shows the speed connected to the mobile hotspot on the n900 as 11mbps.

I assume (i know I know) that it is correct as it is in the range that the n900 is issuing when I watch how the backend loads. The ip is 10.176.159.12 and the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0.

It is obtaining an ip address from the n900 still and shows the gateway, dns and dhcp server as the n900. I have tried this from 2 laptops with the same result one running windows xp and my m11x running windows 7.

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.