• IBM Thinkpad
• Cingular Aircard 875 (note, this is really a Sierra card)
• Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 (updated system as of 20080510)

The first step was to make sure the drivers were being loaded into the system correctly when the hardware was inserted. The simple way to do this is tail the message log.

sudo tail -f /var/log/messages

Upon inserting the card, I saw that the card was recognized and that the device was assigned some ttyUSB device nodes.

Upon inserting card…

May 10 10:00:49 spicy kernel: [ 688.462393] sierra 5-1:1.0: Sierra USB modem (3 port) converter detected
May 10 10:00:49 spicy kernel: [ 688.463909] usb 5-1: Sierra USB modem (3 port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0
May 10 10:00:49 spicy kernel: [ 688.464288] usb 5-1: Sierra USB modem (3 port) converter now attached to ttyUSB1
May 10 10:00:49 spicy kernel: [ 688.464599] usb 5-1: Sierra USB modem (3 port) converter now attached to ttyUSB2
May 10 10:00:49 spicy kernel: [ 688.464833] usbcore: registered new interface driver sierra
May 10 10:00:49 spicy kernel: [ 688.464839] /build/buildd/linux-2.6.24/drivers/usb/serial/sierra.c: USB Driver for Sierra Wireless USB modems: v.1.2.5b

Make sure that you see the lines similar to “usb 5-1: Sierra USB modem (3 port) converter now attached to ttyUSB0”. This tells you that you will be able to use device ttyUSB0 to make your connection.

Now, this is the point where I could have used some of the config files in the previous post but I wanted to focus on using the GUI configuration tools.

So, click on the Network Manager applet and select “Manual Configuration”. Once this appears on your screen, click the “Unlock” button and authenticate.

Select the “Point to Point” connection and then click on the “Properties” button.

On the general tab, enter the following information:

• Connection Type: Serial Modem
• Phone Number: *99***1#
• Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
• Password: cingular1

On the modem tab, enter the following information:

• Modem port: /dev/ttyUSB0

On the options tab, select the following check boxes:

• Set modem as default route to Internet
• Use the Internet service providers nameservers

Click the “OK” button. Your ppp connection is now configured. You can close the “Network Settings” window. Now, logout of your gnome session. The key here is to restart the Network Manager applet so that it recognizes the new ppp connection.

Once you log back in, click on the Network Manager applet and select the “Dial Up Connections” option and then”Connect to ppp0 via Modem”. This will start you Cingular connection and you should be good to go.

Notes:

• You can monitor the connection progress by having a terminal widow open and executing the following command: ‘sudo tail -f /var/log/messages’
• Firefox may think that it is working offline when you first start the application. Click on ‘File’ → ‘Work Offline’ to make sure the option is not set. I was then able to browse with no problems.

There are some things to know about our directory. All of the users that will access the repository will get the same read/write permission. All of these users exist in a single OU within the directory. Access to the repository will be allowed over HTTP. I will be using Apache as the web server.

After a simple base install, I only had to install a few additional components. My memory here is a little rusty, so please bear with me…

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sudo apt-get install libapache2-svn subversion subversion-tools

This should fetch the subversion components and other dependencies. Confirm yes when asked about the Apache installation.

After the installation is complete, you will need to do some configuration in order to enable the subversion components. First test to make sure the components can load.

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# cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
# sudo ln -s /etc/apache2/mods-available/dav_svn.load
# sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

If you do not see any errors relating to the start of Apache, the subversion components could be loaded and it is time to configure. If you see some errors, step back and find yourself to Google.

In order to configure the components, we must create a config file. I created mine in the terminal again and opened the document in gedit to edit the contents.

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# cd /etc/apache2/mods-enabled
# sudo touch dav_svn.conf
# sudo gedit dav_svn.conf

Here is the contents of the configuration file.

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# Must be turned on to make Apache aware that this is a WEBDAV share run be subversion
DAV svn
 
# Path to my repository location
SVNParentPath /srv/svn/repos
 
# In addition to setting the AuthType, be sure to configure the provider.
AuthType Basic
AuthBasicProvider ldap
AuthName "HCL Subversion Server"
 
# LDAP authentication first binds to the directory and searches for the user specified.  This
# user is used to bind to the directory and perform the search.  Obviously, change the
# DN to a user you have with the correct password.
AuthLDAPBindDN "CN=ldap,OU=Service Accounts,OU=HCL Users,DC=hcl,DC=internal"
AuthLDAPBindPassword ****
 
# This is the most critical part.  This is the URL to the LDAP server specifying the scope
# to search for the user.  See the notes below.
AuthLDAPURL "ldap://gallodc01.hcl.internal:3268/OU=IT,OU=HCL Users,DC=hcl,DC=internal?sAMAccountName"
 
# For some reason this must be set.  Anyone have any ideas?  If it is not set, the entire
# config does not work.  The error logs do not provide much information either.
AuthzLDAPAuthoritative Off
 
require valid-user

There are a few things I want to bring to your attention as I found they related to Active Directory. All of this is in the AuthLDAPURL parameter. First off, you must identify the server that holds the Global Catalog and specify port 3268. The second part is to make sure that sAMAccountName is set as your user identifier. I am not sure is case matters at this point but having worked with Microsoft products long enough, I am just going to match this up with what I found with ADSI Edit.

ADSI Edit??? Yes, that is what I used to interrogate Active Directory to make sure that I was using the proper field. In other LDAP environments, this would be UID or even CN depending upon the LDAP flavor. I would imagine that you could use the standard mail attribute in which case the username would be the email address. That attribute seems constant among all directories I have seen.

Before you restart Apache one last time, create the repo directories, create a repository, and fix the permissions for web access.

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# sudo mkdir -p /srv/svn/repos
# cd /srv/svn/repos
# sudo svnadmin create test
# sudo chown -r www-data:www-data test
# sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Hopefully you received no errors. Only thing left is to checkout your test project to make sure everything works correctly.

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# cd ~
# svn co --username {AD Username} http://localhost/repos/test

Updated content for Ubuntu 8.04 is available in this post.

I will be taking a trip next week and I wanted to use my department’s WAP card for Internet access. I’m a linux kinda guy though and went on the search for the configuration. I found some notes relating to KDE and OpenSuSE, however I am running Ubuntu Feisty. Here are my modifications to get this card to work.

/etc/ppp/peers/cingular

hide-password
noauth
connect "/usr/sbin/chat -v -f /etc/chatscripts/cingular"
debug
/dev/ttyUSB0
115200
defaultroute
noipdefault
user "WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM"
remotename cingular
ipparam cingular
usepeerdns


/etc/chatscripts/cingular

ABORT BUSY ABORT 'NO CARRIER' ABORT VOICE ABORT 'NO DIALTONE' ABORT 'NO DIAL TONE' ABORT 'NO ANSWER' ABORT DELAYED
'' "ATZ" 'OK' 'AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","ISP.CINGULAR"'
OK-AT-OK "ATDT*99***1#"
CONNECT \d\c


/etc/ppp/chapsecrets

"WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM" * "cingular1"

After that, to establish the connection, open a terminal and type ‘pon cingular’. If anyone has better ways to perform this action, please let me know. I wish there was a GUI that could configure and manage the entire thing.

Technorati Tags: Linux, Ubuntu, Cingular, AirCard, Feisty