Blackberry tethering in Mandriva with barry-ppp

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ATTENTION GOOGLERS: this post is now superseded by a much more up-to-date and in-depth article on the subject. Please read that instead.

So I woke up early this morning to watch the athletics, and then I was at kind of a loose end...so I borrowed the boyfriend's Blackberry (Curve) and got tethering working.

For anyone who absolutely must tether a Blackberry with Mandriva, right now, or die, here's the quick and very dirty way. I intend to get this integrated much more smoothly into our networking tools for the release of 2009, though. For 2008 Spring you'll need /backports enabled for this.

  1. urpmi task-blackberry-gnome

  2. urpmi barry-ppp

(plug in blackberry)

  1. cp /usr/share/doc/barry-ppp/barry-sprint /etc/ppp/peers/barry-sprint

  2. cp /usr/share/doc/barry-ppp/barry-sprint.chat /etc/ppp/barry-sprint.chat

  3. sed -i -e 's,/etc/chatscripts/barry-sprint.chat,/etc/ppp/barry-sprint.chat,g' /etc/ppp/peers/barry-sprint

(just pointing the options file to the chat file, I don't know where it's "supposed" to go on MDV)

  1. pppd call barry-sprint

On Sprint, or Telus in Canada, this will get the basic connection up and working. Probably. :) It's different for every network, though. There are four sample files included in barry-ppp; try each set (replacing barry-sprint above with barry-verizon etc). If you have no luck, look around online for people who've got your network working with another device, and see if you can transfer the ideas to the Blackberry config scripts.

It still won't be working, as there's no route and no DNS config: this is because we've just bypassed the MDV network config setup entirely. There will be a cleaner way to do this, but I don't know it offhand, so I did it quick and dirty:

  1. route add default dev ppp0
  2. echo 208.67.222.222 >> /etc/resolv.conf

and you should have a working connection. Now celebrate. As I said, we'll be cleaning this up.

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