[OLPC Networking] [Server-devel] WvDial, Networking Issues in XS 0.6/0.7

[Sameer Verma]

On Sat, Mar 17, 2012 at 9:27 PM, Shaun Pickford
<shaun.pickford at gmail.com> wrote:
> OLPC Community,
>
> Building off of the previous email I sent this morning, I want to present
> our situation to you very briefly and see if anyone can provide some
> guidance. We have a team in Haiti and some of us behind in the States. Our
> team in Haiti is coming back on Monday, and would really like to set up an
> XS and get it running and sharing an internet connection before they leave.
> We have a FitPC with XS 0.7 and a 3G card that is used for internet
> connected via USB. The goal is to share that internet connection over a
> wireless network that XOs and other laptops can connect to. We've identified
> that we need wvdial to do this (unless someone can point us in the direction
> of something else that is on the XS 0.7 build, as it doesn't appear our
> internet is working). In the email I sent this morning, we mentioned that
> when we do a yum install for wvdial, we get an error that it could not
> resolve the host. We've done pretty extensive searching on this, and it
> appears that the computer is simply not connecting to the internet (or at
> least that's what I think is the issue...I could be wrong). I set up a
> Virtual Machine on my computer (I'm in the states) and installed XS 0.6 on
> the VM. There were no connectivity issues with the internet, and when I ran
> a yum installer for wvdial, it performed an update to Fedora, then told me
> that wvdial was already installed. I also setup a VM with XS 0.7 (matching
> the environment of the FitPC in Haiti), and experienced the exact same
> issues with no Internet connectivity and no ability to perform the yum
> install of wvdial (same error message). I worked with the 0.7 VM for hours
> today (important to note I'm very new to Linux), but to no avail. It's
> interesting that the 0.6 VM had no issues whatsoever.
> Ultimately, my question is...is there something we're missing on 0.7 that we
> need to make everything work? We've gone through the setup and configuration
> outlined in the XS documentation, and all we're trying to do is a simple yum
> install of wvdial. Another question is, do we need wvdial for what we want
> to do? Or is there something else we can use? Should we just wipe the FitPC
> and install XS 0.6, based on the success we had with the Virtual Machine?
>
> Thanks in advance, and I appreciate timely repsonses by anyone, as the team
> is coming back to the states on Monday.
> --
> Shaun Pickford
> shaun.pickford at gmail.com
> www.shaunpickford.com
>
>
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>


On the 0.7, once you are done with the installation, the primary
Ethernet port (eth0) which acted as a WAN connection during
installation becomes a LAN connection after the reboot. eth0 now
becomes ready to serve IP addresses to XOs. To get to the Internet
(WAN) you will need a second ethernet port (we use a USB-to-Ethernet
adapter in Jamaica). That second port becomes WAN. In your case, the
Natcom device could become the WAN, except that you don't have wvdial
to make it work. To get wvdial, you need some way to get the RPMs from
the Internet.

One option that I can think of (not tested) is the use the xs-swapnics
script and swap your WAN <->LAN so you get access to the internet
temporarily via eth0. Once you are able to isntall the required RPMs,
run xs-swapnics again and switch back to eth0=LAN and Natcom=WAN.

I haven't tested this, but maybe others can chime in.

--
Sameer
Currently at http://coe-msb.org/ and http://olpcjamaica.org.jm