Monday, March 8, 2010

Cricket Modem On Linux

I have a Cal-Comp A600 USB 3G modem from Cricket as my backup internet connection.  It's a "flip-flop" USB device that presents a small disk when first plugged in that has all the drivers you need to Windows and Mac.  Once the drivers are installed, they know how to frob the device to make it look like a modem, and not just a USB stick.

Getting this to work in Linux seems really poorly documented, so here's my attempt to save some poor bastard in the future a few minutes of pain:

# Flip this device
usb_modeswitch -v 0x1f28 -p 0x0021 -m 0x08 -M 55534243b82e238c24000000800108df200000000000000000000000000000
# Hold a moment for things to catch up
sleep 5
# Reset the device so it will come back as a modem
usb_modeswitch -v 0x1f28 -p 0x0020 -R 1

After that, NetworkManager should see a CDMA modem and offer to set it up for you (at least on Fedora 11 and 12, and I guess other recent distros with recent NetworkManger).

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