Just Uber

Take a deep breath, unwind and relax. Setting up your Ubuntu Linux powered PC for mobile internet access isn’t half as hard as you thought it’d be.

My brother just got a £7.50 a month deal with Three, for 3 GB per month of internet access over 3G (HSDPA). I installed Ubuntu onto a PC for him and had a bash at getting the 3G dongle up and running.

Here is the easiest way to get this up and running.

1.) Plug the dongle into a spare USB slot and restart the computer.

2.) Download the Vodafone Mobile Connect Card Driver for Linux. The version I’m using is 1.99.17 (Beta) and comes as a .deb package.

3.) After installing, run the Vodafone application that you’ll now find in Applications > Internet.

4.) If the application doesn’t detect your dongle restart your PC and try again (although it should).

5.) Insert these settings if you’re using the Three (UK) network. Leave the DNS settings empty to allow dynamic configuration of DNS.

Username: three
Password: three

Preferred connection: 3G preferred
Authentication mode: Default
APN host: 3internet

6.) That’s about it. You should be able to see a signal strength bar at the bottom of the app screen, and connecting to the internet is a simple as pressing the big green connect button.

The vodafone application itself is pretty good. Particularly useful is the usage indicator. It allows you to restrict the amount of data transferred to help ensure that you don’t breach your monthly limit. Check out the screenshot below. Cool eh?

Enjoy mobile internet on Linux!

Fortunately Ubuntu has packages for Asterisk and Destar located in the Universe repository, so running the following command will grab and install them for you.

sudo apt-get install asterisk destar python2.4

Hardy ships with Python 2.5 but DeStar throws errors unless it’s running on Python 2.4. Therefore you need to tell destar to use Python 2.4 instead.

edit /usr/share/destar/python/destar.py

so that the top line reads:

#!/usr/bin/python2.4

Asterisk needs to be configured to allow DeStar to manage it. To do this, create a file called destar.conf in /etc/asterisk/manager.d/ Change the secret to a password of your choosing.

[destarman]
secret=123342342
deny=0.0.0.0/0.0.0.0
permit=127.0.0.1/255.255.255.0
read=,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user
write=,system,call,log,verbose,command,agent,user

Try DeStar now by going to http://servername:8080 The default username is admin and the password ad26. (don’t forget the dot at the end). You should change it.

In the DeStar web GUI go to Configuration > Options > Management API Access and ensure that the secret there is the same as the secret in your destarman.conf file.

You should now have Asterisk installed and DeStar configured to manage it!