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These instructions worked for me, using a MacBook Pro running Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) and a Motorola Ming (A1200) running the generic 46p firmware and connecting to T-Mobile in the US via GPRS. Please let me know if they work or don’t work for you – and remember to check the A1200 forum at MotorolaFans.com

Step 1: preparing your Mac to use the phone

Add this Motorola Ming script to /Library/Modem Scripts on your Mac.

Next open a terminal window (Terminal can be found under Applications/Utilities) and execute the following:
echo ":192.168.0.254" > /tmp/options; sudo mv /tmp/options /etc/ppp/options
(you’ll have to type in your password here to authenticate as administrator in order to be allowed to write in /etc/ppp).

Step 2: getting your phone ready to connect

In the main menu click on Bluetooth. Click on the menu button (lower left corner) and switch the phone to be “Discoverable”.

Step 3: starting the communication on your Mac

Turn Bluetooth on on the Mac as well and start the Bluetooth Setup Assistant (you can get to that from System Preferences -> Bluetooth -> Devices -> Set Up New Device…). Search for “Mobile Phone” and it should list all the Bluetooth phones in the vicinity that are discoverable. Click on “Motorola A1200″ (or, if you have a China Mobile flash image, click on Motorola 明) and continue.

Next you need to exchange the secret key for pairing the Bluetooth devices (just follow the requests on both the computer and the phone) and then grant the computer access. After a moment the Mac will suggest that it can use the Address Book and offer Internet through the phone. Since we want to set up GPRS you need to select the “Use a direct, higher speed connection…” option (even though “higher speed” is rather subjective, here).

Next comes the “Bluetooth Mobile Phone Set Up” dialog. As username and password you can pick anything, tmobile / tmobile works. The GPRS CID String is *99***2#. As Modem Script pick the “Motorola Ming” script that we installed earlier. Hit Continue and you should be done here.

Step 4: dialing out

Start “Internet Connect” (under Applications). Click on Bluetooth. The Configuration should all be set up correctly, all you need to do hit Connect (for some reason I occasionally am asked to type in the password again – no idea when and why then – just type “tmobile”).

You should be connected!

Update: these instructions won’t work if you are using Mac OS 10.5 Leopard – they were written for 10.4 Tiger. I wrote another post on how to use the Ming as GPRS (and EDGE!) modem under Leopard.

Wow, now that I have the blog at Intel, I seem to be writing less here again. Go figure…

As I mentioned in my personal blog, my Mac Mini died a sudden and untimely death yesterday morning. And that Mini (Intel based, of course) has been the server for both email and blogs here at hohndel.org. Oops.

While I wait for the Mini to be fixed, I decided to migrate everything to my desktop system (a G5 Dual-Core PowerMac). Getting the web server up and running was almost trivial: make the system have an alias on the correct internal IP address (the one that the firewall sends all external traffic to). Since I used that system as my internal “staging area” for the blogs everything else was already there.

Getting the mailserver set up, however, was a different experience. For the Mini I had simply paid ten dollars for the very well done Postfix Enabler. That sets up both postfix and an imap daemon. But since this was going to be a very temporary solution, I figured I’d just hack it myself (after all, I had set up postfix on Linux many many times).

Since anything on the web tends to stay around, let’s start pointing out that these comments are about Mac OS X 10.4.7 (the latest version of Tiger as of this writing).

The oddities begin with the firewall setup in the System Preferences. There are no default settings to allow smtp through (nor domain name service, which was the other internal service I had to enable, but after opening that port in the firewall that was fairly straight forward). Adding them isn’t hard, but it seems like something Apple should add a default for.

In order to set up postfix as a simple recipient for my domains and as a simple forwarder using my ISP’s relay-host was easy (just a few edits to the postfix/main.cf file) and worked right away on the localhost interface. But any connection attempt to one of the external addresses of the system failed. I checked and re-checked postfix/main.cf. And it literally took me an hour to figure out that there was a second set of entries at the very end of the file for some of the key variables under the heading THE FOLLOWING DEFAULTS ARE SET BY APPLE. And those overwrote the setting for inet_interfaces that I had changed earlier in the file (at it’s normal place in the file).

I already complained to an Apple software developer whom I know, but please, if any of you know someone inside Apple’s software team… please tell them to fix this (or at least add a pointer to that location at the end of the file in the part of the file that documents each of these options).

Needless to say, after that change everything worked smoothly. I’d just like to prevent anyone else from having to waste their time.