Yet another blog post about tethering your Android-powered phone to a router via USB.

-
This post summarizes my experience with flashing my router's stock firmware to an opensource firmware to enable it to use the USB port as the WAN connection. The Internet (WAN) connection is provided by an Android-powered smartphone via USB tethering.

Specifically, I have a D-Link DIR-825 Wireless N router. HW Rev. B1. It has one USB port. The phone is a Samsung Galaxy S 4G (SGH-T959W); it is not the same as a Samsung Galaxy Vibrant. My cellular provider is Mobilicity and my phone number is.... j/k. I'm not releasing that. 

So I first tried flashing the DD-WRT firmware to my DIR-825. This is a very nice firmware: nice GUI and excellent features, most of which I don't know how to use. It can bridge the various interfaces such as WiFi to the LAN, it can act in a Wireless Distribution System, it has various hotspots for potential revenue-generation using landing pages to share Internet, it has awesome graphs for monitoring bandwidth and usage, and it has support for various USB devices from printers, to storage, to 3G USB modems.

And that's where I got stuck.  I had DD-WRT v24-sp2 (03/19/12) std r18777 installed on the router. I enabled Core USB Support under the Services menu along with USB Storage Support. Set the WAN Connection Type to "3G/UMTS/4G/LTE" and input the APN settings for Mobilicity. Then I plugged in the Galaxy S 4G into the USB port, via a USB cable of course, and enabled USB tethering on the phone which is running Gingerbread 2.3.6.

This did not work; router clients did not have Internet connectivity. I SSH'd into the router and ran cat /proc/bus/usb/devices
T: Bus=01 Lev=01 Prnt=01 Port=00 Cnt=01 Dev#= 3 Spd=480 MxCh= 0
D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=02(comm.) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1
P: Vendor=04e8 ProdID=6881 Rev= 4.00
S: Manufacturer=SAMSUNG
S: Product=SAMSUNG_Android
S: SerialNumber=T959f1f202cd
C:* #Ifs= 2 Cfg#= 1 Atr=c0 MxPwr= 96mA
A: FirstIf#= 0 IfCount= 2 Cls=02(comm.) Sub=06 Prot=00
I:* If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 1 Cls=02(comm.) Sub=02 Prot=ff Driver=(none)
E: Ad=86(I) Atr=03(Int.) MxPS= 8 Ivl=32ms
I:* If#= 1 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=0a(data ) Sub=00 Prot=00 Driver=(none)
E: Ad=8b(I) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
E: Ad=0a(O) Atr=02(Bulk) MxPS= 512 Ivl=0ms
 As you can see, no drivers were attached to the device; whereas before enabling tethering on the phone, the Interface line said I:* If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 2 Cls=08(stor.) Sub=06 Prot=50 Driver=usb-storage indicating the usb-storage driver was bound.

From looking through the DD-WRT wiki at http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/3G_/_3.5G I didn't find any Samsung devices supported. I had hoped that DD-WRT would support this phone as there were a few Android smartphones listed in addition to all the USB rocket sticks. But alas, there seems to be no compatibility with the Galaxy S 4G.

Because I don't give up easily and knew that the desired result is feasible, I looked for more solutions. First, I tested USB tethering this phone to a Linux LiveCD (Linux Mint 14) and looked at the modules it enabled. Running lsmod from a terminal window listed rndis_host and cdc_ether, which I had read about somewhere before. A quick search in Google and I found a number of webpages/blog posts referencing these modules and a forum post on OpenWRT's forum.

They are:
Starting with OpenWRT Backfire 10.03.1 final flashed to the D-Link DIR-825 and following the instructions in the forum post linked above, I had everything required. However, once I connected the Galaxy S 4G to the router and enabled USB tethering in Android, I still didn't have Internet connectivity.

From SSH on the router, I ran dmesg | grep usb and got this
usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ar71xx-ehci and address 1
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
usb 1-1: USB disconnect, address 1
usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ar71xx-ehci and address 2
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
usb 1-1: bad CDC descriptors
instead of
usb 1-1: new high speed USB device using ar71xx-ehci and address 2
usb 1-1: configuration #1 chosen from 1 choice
usb0: register 'rndis_host' at usb-ar71xx-ehci-1, RNDIS device, aa:cc:b6:36:b3:97

Additionally, cat /proc/bus/usb/devices was similar to the above result where "Driver=(none)"

So I decided to test my other Android phone, a Motorola RAZR HD running ICS 4.0.4. This phone produced the desired result with rndis_host being bound to the device as a driver. But I had no intentions of tethering the Motorola on a limited data plan to the router.

Finally, after downloading and installing the newest version of OpenWRT, Attitude Adjustment 12.09-rc1, and the new versions of the packages as listed in the above linked articles, from: http://downloads.openwrt.org/attitude_adjustment/12.09-rc1/ar71xx/generic/packages/
I plugged in the Samsung Galaxy S 4G to the router and everything worked!  Next step is to flash the ROM on the Galaxy S 4G to ICS or JB and see if it still functions.

Recommended: If you have software on your NAT'ed internal computers that use UPnP to automatically configure the router to for example, expose a port and redirect external traffic to that internal device, then you should install the miniupnpd package as well.  The version available at the time I setup Attitude Adjustment 12.09-rc1 and seems to work with it is 1.6.20110730-6.  Specifically for DIR-825, the package is here. Although there might be newer versions that are also compatible.

This discussion https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?id=29531 explains why someone may want to install the UPnP package instead of setting up portforwarding redirects (and related rules) in /etc/firewall.user. This wiki page explains setting up Universal Plug'n'Play and NAT-PMP on OpenWrt and the instructions for installing the package is the same as the 3rd link in the first list above.

Possible explanation for why the newer version of OpenWRT works while the older version, 10.03.1, does not?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/796006
Thread about potential solution using similar modules in DD-WRT to achieve the same goal:
http://www.dd-wrt.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?p=485840

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Calculating total interest accrued while paying down the simple interest loan periodically.

-
I was unable to find a web service or calculator on any websites that had a simple interest calculator in which the total of the loan was being payed down regularly. I was forced to make one in Excel. There are plenty of amortization calculators out there that generate the schedule for a loan with compound interest, like a mortgage, but none that show the schedule for a simple interest loan, like some HELOCs (in Canada). My Excel spreadsheet allows one to compare an amortization schedule on a compound interest loan to a schedule for a simple interest loan. This is useful if you want to see the affect of making payments on a simple interest loan, equal to the same amount at the same time of the month on the same frequency as you would on a mortgage. The spreadsheet assumes interest for the simple interest loan is calculated daily and that payments against the loan are applied to the interest accrued first, and then toward the principal. It can be tweaked if you wanted to calculate i...
Read more

A list of "All-Weather" tires with the Mountain/Snowflake symbol and where to get them

-
Image
Though the design and compounds have been around a few years now, it was surprisingly difficult to find tires that are truly All-Weather (good for every season) per Transport Canada standards and meet or exceed the Rubber Association of Canada performance requirements. Since my tires need replacing and I'm not looking for soft winter-specific tires, I have compiled a list of tyres that have the mountain/snowflake rating based upon my search. Perhaps you'll find this list useful and that it saves you time. Nokian pioneered this class of tires and was the first to market but there are now a number of brands with a limited selection. http://www.wheels.ca/news/all-weather-tires-are-not-the-same-as-all-season-and-heres-why/ These makes include: Kumho, Toyo, Falken, Michelin, Vredestein, Hankook, Yokohama, and Nankang, Michelin, Multi-Mile, and Muteki.  Additionally, some are exclusively sold at certain retailers. Tires that have the 3PMSF icon and are all-weather cap...
Read more

New annoyances: Windows 7 and Bluetooth enabled devices.

-
Thorough testing on my part has proven that Windows 7 can not receive large files, approximately anything larger than 225 KB, from some Bluetooth devices. In this case, my Nokia 6301 can not send to the "fsquirt.exe" utility on Windows 7. I tested this with 3 different machines running Windows 7 (6.01.7600), two laptops with built-in bluetooth and a desktop using a bluetooth dongle. The error message offers no clue as to why or what happened. All it says is " Bluetooth file transfer not completed " " The transfer was cancelled by the Bluetooth device or Bluetooth enabled computer. " However, the Nokia 6301 has no problem receiving large multi-megabyte files from a PC running Windows 7. The Nokia 6301 is also able to send/receive large files to other devices (phones, PDA's), and computers running Windows XP, Vista, or Mac OS X. On the other hand, Windows 7 was able to receive files over bluetooth from other bluetooth-enabled devices, including: com...
Read more