Notices

Using 2.6.28.10power37 kernel and with mobilehotspot from the app manager, I am able to start mobilehotspot (with error, see below) and see the ad-hoc network over the air. However, despite dnsmasq being configured, no dhcp offer is received from connecting clients. Even worse, nothing is reachable when the connecting computer is configured with static IP in the same subnet as the n900. The n900's IP is 10.23.213.1 as per the mobilehotspot scripts.

One thing, I noticed that there's no gateway in the n900's routing table. That doesn't seem right, how can gprs work without a gateway? If dhcp was working correctly, would it autoconfigure dns servers to the connecting clients? If not, what am I supposed to enter for dns servers on the connecting devices?

The error when starting mobilehotspot_backend:
The error when stopping mobilehotspot_backend or calling mobilehotspot from the shell:
Both of those seem minor to me, and they do not halt the further execution of the script.

@ifreeman,

Just to let you know about the gateway issue, it does work, i don't know where the gateway record is configured, but you should see something like : How does that translate into an IP address for a next hop, I don't know, but on the N900, that works.

So just saying, your problem is somewhere else, not in the gateway part.

Yes, it's very interesting. route -n does not show the G flag on the gprs route. I don't know what that's all about, however it's the least of my worries, I just mentioned it as an aside.

Just found that the introspect message is not important here:
http://talk.maemo.org/showpost.php?p...&postcount=256

So, the only issue that remains for me is why does the client network not seem routed to the n900's wifi wireless network?

My network before starting mobilehotspot:
And after starting it:

Can you ping the N900 IP-address if you set your client machine to use static IP ? What IP does your N900 get from GPRS side (the possibility for IP-range clash is very small but exists).

whenever i try to press start, i always get "hotspot failed to start"...

any idea how i can fix this?

You need to start the backend from terminal to see debug output, see earlier this thread for details (like for example the DBUS introspection error that is not a problem for us) and instructions.

No, I cannot ping the n900, either with the private ip (10.23.213.1) or the gprs ip (25.161.93.130).

The client ip I'm pinging from is the first in the range when configured dhcp, and is 10.23.213.2 when configured static.

i also have an issue.

mobile hotspot works fine for me, but once every so often (1/2 hour ? 45 minutes ? or more?) the internet access "disappears" in that my laptop is still connected to the n900 but there is no internet access (i.e. my laptop running windows 7 says "no internet access" on my wlan connection). Meanwhile, there is no explicit error on the n900 GUI (i.e. mobile hotspot seems to be still running on the n900 when the internet disappears).

To fix this, I have to turn off mobile hotspot (as in exit hte app) and restart it again. That seems to fix it until the internet connection dies again. And after a few restarts a mobile hotspot restart will actually trigger a reboot of the maemo OS (this is much less often though).

Any idea what causes this ? How would I go about getting debug info for an error that appears at random AFTER the mobile hotspot starts and works OK? (instructions here seem to be for getting error text for when mobile hotspot starts).

Note that the n900 isnt hot when this happens and I have not OCed my N900 in anyway or done any weird apps. I do have the IP address widget though but I thought the widget would not cause this ?

I have ip-address widget installed too, no problems with that.

I'd guess you windows has some way to "detect" internet connection, probably "phone home". Please check the IP address you windows has when it shows this message, also see if you can still ping the N900. With ad-hoc networks "connected" has a different meaning, since you machine might still keep the ad-hoc network available even if the other peer(s) disappear.

Also check on the N900 itself that it can still reach sites on the internet and check with iwconfig/ifconfig the status of the wlan0 adapter (it might be that some other process took it down for some reason [this is for example why mobilehotspot disables wifi scanning while it's running, the scan will tear down the ad-hoc connection).

Debugging errors while the "hotspot" is running is basically debugging linux networking, the hotspot software itself does nothing at that point (it's just a handy way to automate the steps needed to setup/teardown the required processes & firewall rules).