SAMBA55/75 Installation instructions using LINUX - Falcom

This document is available at HTTP://WWW.FALCOM.DE/ 

SAMBA55/75 

Installation instructions 

using LINUX 

Version: 1.0.3; Last Updated: 01/04/2008

Installation Instructions for Linux users -SAMBA55/75- Version 1.0.2 

Table of contentS 

1 USING SAMBA55/75 MODEMS ON LINUX ..................................4 

1.1 GENERAL INFORMATION ..................................................................................................4 

1.1.1 SAMABA55/TWIST-USB ....................................................................................4 

1.1.2 SAMBA75 ..........................................................................................................5 

2 CONNECTING SAMBA MODEMS TO THE INTERNET ON LINUX 

........................................................................................................6 

2.1 USING THE COMMAND LINE ..............................................................................................6 

2.1.1 PIN secured phone cards ..................................................................................7 

2.2 KNOPPIX ...................................................................................................................7 

2.3 SUSE ....................................................................................................................10 

2.4 UBUNTU ...................................................................................................................10 

3 KNOWN PROBLEMS ...................................................................11 

Version history: 

Version number Author Changes Release Date 

1.0.0 F. Beqiri Initial version 30/11/2006 

- The parameter in the AT+CGDCON command must be 19/06/2007 

1.0.1 F. Beqiri 

enclosed in quotation marks. 

- Added chapter 2.1.1 - provides information about PIN secured phone 

cards. 

1.0.2 F. Beqiri 

- To use TWIST-USB, do the same steps used for SAMBA55 – See 

chapter 1.1.1. 

10/09/2007 

1.0.3 F. Beqiri - Additional known problems added - see chapter 3, point 2 01/04/2008 

This confidential document is a property of FALCOM and may not be copied or circulated without previous permission. 

Page 2


Cautions 

Information furnished herein by FALCOM is accurate and reliable. However, 

no responsibility is assumed for its use. 

Please, read carefully the safety precautions. 

If you have any technical questions regarding this document or the product 

described in it, please contact your vendor. 

General information about FALCOM and its range of products are available 

at the following Internet address: http://www.falcom.de/ 

Trademarks 

Some mentioned products are registered trademarks of their respective 

companies. 

Copyright 

This documentation is copyrighted by FALCOM WIRELESS 

COMMUNICATIONS GmbH with all rights reserved. No part of this 

documentation may be produced in any form without the prior written 

permission of FALCOM WIRELESS COMMUNICATIONS GmbH. 

FALCOM Wireless Communications GmbH. 

No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information 

contained herein. 


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1 USING SAMBA55/75 MODEMS ON LINUX 

1.1 General information 

1.1.1 SAMABA55/TWIST-USB 

The same steps can also be done using FALCOM TWIST-USB. 

The SAMBA55 modem will be detected as a USB serial device using a FTDI USB serial 

converter driver. 

The needed driver is relatively new and may not be included in older 2.6 kernel 

versions. In this case you might have to rebuild your kernel using the option: 

Code maturity level options -> Prompt for development and/or 

incomplete code/drivers 

Following USB drivers have to be selected in the kernel (either as modules or 

directly compiled into the kernel): 

1. Device Drivers -> USB-Support -> 

● UHCI HCD (on Intel/Via boards) or OHCI (on most other boards) respectively 

● USB Serial Converter Support -> 

✔ USB Serial Converter Support 

✔ USB FTDI Single Port Serial Driver 

To check whether the modules are available in your operating system, open a 

terminal and enter the following: 

root@linux:~/# ls /lib/modules/2.6.x/kernel/drivers/usb/serial/ 

There should be at least the following files: 

✔ usbserial.ko 

✔ ftdi_sio.ko 

� If you have built a new kernel, reboot your system to load it. 

Before continuing the other steps, make sure that all services are started after 

rebooting. 

Connect the SAMBA55 modem to an available USB port on your PC and open a 

terminal to execute the command dmesg. 

The last lines of the log should look like this: 

usb 5-2: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2 

usb 5-2: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice 

usbcore: registered new driver usbserial 

drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for 

generic 

usbcore: registered new driver usbserial_generic 

drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial Driver core 

drivers/usb/serial/usb-serial.c: USB Serial support registered for 

FTDI USB Serial Device 

ftdi_sio 5-2:1.0: FTDI USB Serial Device converter detected 

drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: Detected FT8U232AM 

usb 5-2: FTDI USB Serial Device converter now attached to ttyUSB0 


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usbcore: registered new driver ftdi_sio 

drivers/usb/serial/ftdi_sio.c: v1.4.3:USB FTDI Serial Converters 

Driver 

Should the kernel modules usbserial and ftdi_sio not be loaded, please 

execute the command modprobe usbserial and modprobe ftdi_sio. Please 

remind that you need to be root user to execute both commands. 

Now search in your file system in /dev for a device node like ttyUSB*, where * can 

be a number between 0 and 255. Should there are more than one node available 

look for the creation times with ls -l /dev/ttyUSB* to find out which node 

corresponds with the time you plugged in the SAMBA device to your system. 

(Tested with Gentoo-Linux 2006.1, Kernel 2.6.18, Knoppix 5.0, Novell SuSE Linux 

10.1, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS). 

1.1.2 S AMBA75 

The SAMBA75 will be detected as a USB ACM device using a Abstract Control 

Modem driver for USB modems and ISDN adapters. 

After plugging in the SAMBA75 the Linux automatically detects and initialises the 

driver. You can see the result by typing dmesg on a terminal. The output should 

look somehow like this: 




cdc_acm 5-2:1.0: ttyACM0: USB ACM device 

usbcore: registered new driver cdc_acm 

drivers/usb/class/cdc-acm.c: v0.25:USB Abstract Control Model driver 

for USB modems and ISDN adapters 

In this case the modem was detected successfully on dev/ttyACM0. You can 

now continue to link the device as described below. 

(Tested with Gentoo-Linux 2006.1, Knoppix 5.0, Novell SuSE Linux 10.1, Ubuntu 6.06 LTS). 


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2 CONNECTING SAMBA MODEMS TO THE INTERNET ON 

LINUX 

2.1 Using the command line 

This is a general description how to connect to the internet using command line 

tools. You can apply this description on most Linux distributions. 

Necessary applications: 

1) ppp/pppd 

2) wvdial (http://open.nit.ca/wiki/?WvDial) 

Edit the wvdial configuration file (/etc/wvdial.conf) or create a new one. The 

configuration file should contain at least the following entries: 

FALCOM SAMBA55 FALCOM SAMBA75 

[Dialer Defaults] 

Modem = /dev/ttyUSB0 

Modem Name = SAMBA55 

Modem Type = USB Modem 

Baud = 230400 

ISDN = false 

Idle Seconds = 180 

Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP",internet * 

Init2 = AT+CGATT=1 

Password = test * 

Phone = *99***1# 

Username = test * 

Dial Command = ATD 

* here you have to enter in the APN, username and password of your GSM provider 

Table 1: Configuration file with entries 

For more configuration options use: 

root@linux:~/# man wvdial.conf 

[Dialer Defaults] 

Modem = /dev/ttyACM0 

Modem Name = SAMBA75 

Modem Type = USB Modem 

Baud = 230400 

ISDN = false 

Idle Seconds = 180 

Init1 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP",”internet” * 


Password = test * 

Phone = *99***1# 

Username = test * 

Dial Command = ATD 

Open a terminal (e.g. Xterm, kterm or gnome-terminal) and run wvdial with: 

root@linux:~/# wvdial -C /etc/wvdial.conf 

After a few seconds the modem should connect to the internet via GPRS. You can 

check the device status with the following command to see if it works correctly: 

root@linux:~/# ifconfig ppp0 

A similar output should be displayed: 

ppp0 Link encap:Point-to-Point Protocol 

inet addr:10.69.60.203 P-t-P:192.168.254.254 Mask:255.255.255.255 

UP POINTOPOINT RUNNING NOARP MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 

RX packets:4 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0 

TX packets:5 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0 

collisions:0 txqueuelen:3 

RX bytes:64 (64.0 b) TX bytes:97 (97.0 b) 


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You can check the connection with a simple ping, e.g. 

root@linux:~/# ping www.falcom.de 

PING www.falcom.de (80.237.207.12) 56(84) bytes of data. 

64 bytes from www.falcom.de (80.237.207.12): icmp_seq=1 ttl=55 

time=938 ms 

64 bytes from www.falcom.de (80.237.207.12): icmp_seq=2 ttl=55 

time=678 ms 

2.1.1 PIN secured phone cards 

For PIN secured phone cards use the following init strings: 

Init1 = AT+CPIN=XXXX 

Init2 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet" 


where XXXX is the PIN of your phone card. 

2.2 Knoppix 

This example illustrates how to connect a SAMBA55 to the Internet using the KDE 

tools which is distributed with Knoppix: 

1) Plug the SAMBA55 modem to the PC and start the modem configuration 

tool 

Figure 1: Start the modem configuration tool 

2) Choose the USB connection: 

Figure 2: Select type of connection 


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3) The port in our example is ttyUSB0. If you have more USB devices 

connected to your system, first check with dmesg (see 1.1) to know 

which port is assigned to the SAMBA55: 

Figure 3: Select ttyUSB port 

4) Let the system create the link of the SAMBA55 device to /dev/modem 

Figure 4: Create a link to /dev/modem 

5) Choose the GPRS/UMTS connection. If you don’t have this software tool, 

you can also use kppd or pppd, but then you need to configure more 

manually: 

Figure 5: Select the GPRS/UMTS connection 


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6) Choose your GSM network provider from the list. If your provider is not 

listed, use other and define the network settings yourself: 

Figure 6: Select GPRS provider 

7) The software warns you of the possible costs before starting that 

connection: 

Figure 7: GPRS warning screen 

8) During dialup you can see a log file. If you press ctrl-c on this screen you 

will close that connection. 

Figure 8: Log file entries during dialling up 


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2.3 SuSE 

• Connect device to a free USB port, 

• Start YaST (Applications -> System -> YaST) 

• Select „Network devices -> Modem“. 

YaST will now list the detected devices 

✔ Select tab „Providers -> Add“, 

✔ next choose your country and your mobile service provider, 

✔ if your provider doesn't appear in the list, choose „New“ and insert the 

necessary information, 

✔ finish the provider configuration. 

Next go back to the tab „Modem devices“ 

1. Select your device from the list („Siemens Information and Communication MC75“ 

for SAMBA75 and „AT Modem“ for SAMBA55) 

2. choose „Edit -> Details“, 

3. set „Baudrate“ to 115200 bps, 

4. replace the value in „Init 1“ with AT+CGDCONT=1,”IP”,”internet” 

5. replace the value in „Init 2“ with AT+CGATT=1 

6. leave „Init 3“ blank, 

7. in „Dial Prefix Regular Expression“ insert ATD 

8. continue with „OK“ and „Next“ 

9. Select you provide from the list 

10. Choose „Next -> Next -> Next“ and finally „Finish“ 

Your SAMBA55/75 is now fully configured. 

� HINT: The default network tool for SuSE Linux / OpenSuSE is Network-Manager which is 

currently (End of 2006) not capable of managing Modem devices. For connecting to the 

Internet via SAMBA55/75 and GPRS you should use kinternet instead. 

2.4 Ubuntu 

The modems will be detected as described above in Chapter 1, page 4. You can 

use wvdial or any other tool you like to connect to the internet. 


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3 KNOWN PROBLEMS 

1. Wrong route 

On some strange provider-SAMBA-device combinations, you may got a wrong 

entry in the Linux kernel routing table, e.g.: 

root@linux:~/# route 

will output something similar to: 

Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 

10.0.0.1 * 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 ppp0 

loopback * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo 

default 10.0.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 ppp0 

Table 2: Kernel IP routing table 

Where the first entry (10.0.0.1) is the wrong route entry. You can easily solve the 

problem, if you manually deleting and re-adding the route, like this: 

Deleting route: 

root@linux:~/# route del 10.0.0.1 

Re-adding route: 

root@linux:~/# route add -h xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx ppp0 

Where xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the correct route’s IP-address (e.g. 192.168.254.254 or 

10.0.254.254). 

The route table should now look similar to this: 

root@linux:~/# route 

Destination Gateway Genmask Flags Metric Ref Use Iface 

192.168.254.254 * 255.255.255.255 UH 0 0 0 ppp0 

loopback * 255.0.0.0 U 0 0 0 lo 

default 10.0.0.1 0.0.0.0 UG 0 0 0 ppp0 

Table 3: Kernel IP routing table 

2. Samba 75 disabled by USB hub 

There are two options causing this behaviour. 

[1] The Samba 75 needs a specific amount of power. If you are using an underpowered 

USB interface Linux will disable that port to prevent hardware 

damage. This is often the case if you are using a laptop or similar devices. 

You can fix this problem by using an additional external USB hub with extra 

power supply. 

[2] If you see a message in the system log file (command: 'dmesg') similar to: 



cdc_acm 2-1:1.0: ttyACM1: USB ACM device 

hub 2-0:1.0: port 1 disabled by hub (EMI?), re-enabling... 

usb 2-1: USB disconnect, address 67 


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the problem is caused by a bug in the Linux kernel. This bug is fixed in 

Linux >= 2.6.25. You can check the version you are using by opening a 

terminal and enter: 

cat /proc/version 


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SAMBA55/75 Installation instructions using LINUX - Falcom

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