Community Matters

As part of my brief set of posts on getting Linux systems (and sometimes Macs) connected to wireless networks beyond WiFi, here’s a quick post on what’s different when connecting to Vodafone.de with their prepaid CallYa SIM in a Huawei USB stick (this is actually a stick that I bought in London for the O2 network – just switch out the SIM… one of the nice things about GSM based networks).

The first few problems that I ran into shouldn’t affect most people, but just in case… be warned, if you have setup your system to use Vodafone.uk in the past, you are likely to have incorrect settings laying around in conf files…

Once those are removed, plug in your modem and simply create a new connection under Network Manager / Mobile Broadband. Set the APN to event.vodafone.de (this is important – contract SIMs use web.vodafone.de but that doesn’t work with CallYa SIMs). You can type in your PIN in that dialogue as well, that way the system doesn’t ask you for it after every reboot. All the other information is optional or not needed – except for the phone number; the usual *99# does the trick.

Go to the Network Manager icon and click on the new connection you created (it should show up under Mobile Broadband, assuming your modem got recognized correctly). Once the connection is established (the NM icon changes to a broadcast tower) open a web browser and navigate to any arbitrary web page. Vodafone will redirect you to a page where you can pick whether you want to purchase 30 minutes, an hour or a day’s worth of “unlimited” internet. Once you went through that process, everything should work. If I tried to open an ssh connection (or something else) before doing the magic web page thing the system occasionally got confused…