problem with huawei e355 with xubuntu 14.04 and modemmanager 1.0.0

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2014-04-22 at 16:50 +0200, Aleksander Morgado wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 22, 2014 at 4:42 PM, Dan Williams <dcbw at redhat.com> wrote:
> >> commit 1f84eab4ad73bcb7d779cba65291fe62909e373f
> >> Author: Bjørn Mork <bjorn at mork.no>
> >> Date:   Wed Feb 27 03:08:58 2013 +0000
> >>
> >>     net: cdc_ncm: tag Huawei devices (e.g. E5331) with FLAG_WWAN
> >>
> >>     Tag all Huawei NCM devices as WWAN modems, as we don't know of any which
> >>     are not.  This is necessary for userspace clients to know that the device
> >>     requires further setup on e.g. an AT-capable serial ports before
> >>     connectivity is available.
> >>
> >> The device is truly a WWAN modem, but again it doesn't require any
> >> ModemManager setup. Dan, can we maybe update NetworkManager to
> >> initially ignore all WWAN flagged devices but only if ModemManager
> >> takes them afterwards in a modem object? In other words, if MM doesn't
> >> end up taking the interface (hum.. how to notify that?) then NM can
> >> try to expose it as a USB net interface...
> >
> > So yeah, we can do this.  But I'd also like to pair it with a
> > ModemManager property for "detecting" that would get flipped on/off when
> > MM was in the process of detecting a new modem.  That would give us two
> > things:
> >
> > 1) NetworkManager would know when the process was done and could then
> > let the WWAN tagged device be an ethernet device
> >
> > 2) User Interfaces could show an indicator when MM was working, so that
> > where detecting the modem might take a bit of time, the user isn't left
> > wondering what's happening, because they plugged in the modem 10 seconds
> > ago and it still hasn't shown up in the menu.
> >
> > What do you think?
> 
> I think that I have suggested that "MM is probing" in the past myself,
> and don't recall why it was not done at the end. Probably missed it in
> my TODOs.
> But anyway, what if we have multiple probing sequences for multiple
> devices? The "detecting" property not sure it can be fit in a boolean
> value... or maybe yes to simplify it. At the end I'm not sure there
> will be many WWAN-flagged net devices which are not handled by MM.

I think such a property has value even if there are WWAN-flagged devices
not handled by MM, just for the UI notification aspect, so users are
informed about what's going on, that the device is still being set up.
That way users don't think that something is wrong and just pull the
device and try again.  That's the UI aspect.

To be more concrete, in GNOME Shell, I would modify the indicator menu
to show a Mobile Broadband section whenever either (a) a detected modem
is present, or (b) whenever the MM "detecting" property was TRUE.  When
MM was just detecting, but no modem was found, it could show a spinner
in the Mobile Broadband section to indicate that something is happening.

The second, *separate* aspect would be that NM would use that property
to know when to present the WWAN-tagged device as a plain ethernet
interface.  Otherwise we would have to do random timeouts in NM, like
"if ModemManager doesn't export a new modem that uses this port within
30 seconds, make it plain ethernet", which is somewhat fragile.

Dan