Re: [Barry-devel] Blackberries rebooting during tethering (was Re: Using pppob with a brazilian provider (TIM))

[Chris F. <cd...@fo...>]

On Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 04:06:34PM -0800, Bill Paul wrote:
> > This is a good idea.  I think it should be possible to add a pthread
> > condition on the write, without too much difficulty.  Are you able to
> > compile and test the latest CVS/git sources?  I'll see if I can whip up
> > a patch tonight.
> 
> I'll see if I can give it a try when I get home from work later.

Ok, I've updated CVS/git with code that adds a '-c' option to pppob.
This turns on handshaking code that prevents writing to USB until it
sees the handshake special packet, or until 1 second passes, whichever
is sooner.  This is experimental only, and if it works, great, but if
it doesn't, it will introduce a 1 second latency to a good number of
outgoing packets.  Hopefully this latency is enough to determine whether
this theory is sound or not.

Please let me know if it helps at all for you.


> That's a good question. I think interest in pppd dropped off a lot once the 
> user mode ppp(8) application was introduced. Getting it updated would require 
> some interest from a developer, and nobody seems to want to get tagged with 
> it. Unfortunately, upgrading it from 2.3 to 2.4 is non-trivial: the stock 
> pppd distribution only supports Linux and SunOS by default, and there seem to 
> be enough differences between the two versions that updating FreeBSD's 
> OS-specific sys-bsd.c module would take a bit of work and testing.

Ahhh, yes... kernel side changes on FreeBSD would be a good enough reason. :-)


> The workaround I used, by the way, was to bind pppob to a pseudo-terminal by 
> starting it with a ptyexec perl script that I discovered here:
> 
> http://www.mail-archive.com/gn...@zk.../msg05685.html
> 
> It's a bit clumsy, but it works.

Neat.  Would you be willing to write up some documentation on this for
other FreeBSD users?  The entire Barry documentation is in HTML format
in the source tree, under doc/www/ and I'd be happy to accept patches
to it.  I'd suggest adding a section to the end of the modem.php page,
if you have the time.  If not, please let me know so I can add it to
my todo list. :-)

I'm happy that Barry seems to work otherwise... under OpenBSD, I needed
to disable the uberry kernel module.  (That note is on the dependencies.php
page).

Thanks,
- Chris