Matching USB modems on serial.port

[Dan Williams]

On Thu, 2009-01-29 at 14:25 +0100, Danny Kukawka wrote:
> On Donnerstag, 29. Januar 2009, Adrian Cox wrote:
> > ----- "Danny Kukawka" <danny.kukawka at web.de> wrote:
> [...]
> > > Please don't do such things. The modem.command_sets proterty should be
> > > used
> > > only if there are values added to the list. Don't add empty
> > > properties.
> >
> > Can you suggest another way to hide the ports? The NetworkManager that
> > ships in Ubuntu Intrepid will crash if it sees those ports as being modem
> > ports. The crash is probably due to the modem probing patch that Ubuntu
> > added in their version of NetworkManager, but we'd much rather put an fdi
> > file on the driver CD than a fixed NetworkManager for each architecture.

You're pretty much going to have to hack up a solution, and get the
upstream Ubuntu packages fixed.

> > Even if we avoid the crash, we still have to work around the Ubuntu
> > NetworkManager probing. If we don't stop it, it will create an entry in the
> > network manager applet for each individual serial port, even though they
> > all talk to the same radio.
> 
> That's clearly a NM bug/problem and should be fixed there. Workarounds are no 
> solution, they only prevents bugs top get fixed. It's better to have a fixed 
> NM for all archs then a fdi file, because you can't fix the problem for all 
> existing devices out there with one fdi file. 

By which you mean an *Ubuntu* bug/problem, that particular probing patch
isn't in upstream NetworkManager, becuase the probing shouldn't be done
in NetworkManager for a number of reasons.

The real fix for this is a patch I'm doing right now, which uses
udev-extras to probe the modem, add the right information to the udev
database, and then have NetworkManager ask for it.  The patch is smart
enough to figure out whether different ports are provided by the same
physical device, and ignore subsequent ports.  After the ModemManager
patches get merged then the extra ports will get used for signal
strength and cell updates while connected.

This patch will get backported to 0.7.1, and it will solve your problem.
It won't solve your *immediate* problem though, but you'll simply have
to hack around that if you don't want to rebuild NetworkManager.

Dan