GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 632219
Network Manager cannot handle login/password with special characters
Last modified: 2014-10-14 09:32:58 UTC
As typically the Ubuntu team asks to forward GNOME related issues upstream to Bugzilla, I'd like to open a Network Manager related bug already reported in Launchpad [1]: This is quite interesting and may also be the reason, why individual users have trouble to use their HSDPA/GPRS devices: I run a DELL Latitude E4300, which features a DELL Mobile HSDPA Modem DW5530. Since updating from Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04), where the modem worked like a charm, I never managed to connect to the Internet under Ubuntu Lucid LTS (10.04) currently featuring GNOME 2.30.2. This, though all settings were double-checked to be identical. Point is, that I've verified the following: Some ISPs require logins/passwords with special characters (please refer e.g. to [2]). In my case connecting to the Internet fails, when trying to connect via A1, but connects perfectly when using a T-Mobile card. Please note, that T-Mobile does not require any particular login or password to be set. Hence this issue is not related to the modem driver, but to the authentication process. Unfortunately I can not provide the link to the Austrian Ubuntu forum, where some guy found out, that this is probably related to an UTF8 issue. As most ISPs do not require any login or password but identify the user via the GSM card ID explains, why this issue affects only a rather small group of users. Changing one's ISP, however, requires to cancel the ISP contract and consequently one has to pay cancellation fees, hence I consider this bug as critical, though the workaround is quite simple. [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+bug/540003 [2] http://linux.frankenberger.at/Huawei_E220_Daten.html
So here's what we can do. If you could help debug a bit by setting up the modem to *not* use modem-manager, but to use plain wvdial and then tar up the wvdial config file where the username or password containing special chars is (to preserve it's string encoding) and mail it to me or attach it. What I'm curious about is the exact byte array of the username or password that works for you, then I can see whether that gets changed by NM/MM and perhaps how to fix it.
Sure, I expect this to work as using wvdial was the workaround proposed in the Austrian forum mentioned above. I'll get back to you as soon as I get home from my business trip.
OK, here we are: Attached please find a working wvdial.conf file (see also [1]). No problems observed so far. [1] http://robert.penz.name/162/mini-howto-on-how-to-get-the-onboard-umts-card-wireless-5530-hsdpa-minicard-of-a-dell-e6500-running-on-kubuntu-904-jaunty/
Created attachment 173300 [details] wvdial config file for A1/Austria
Created attachment 173301 [details] wvdial config file (tar.gz archive)
Can I be of any further assistance?
does the bug still exists?
Yes, indeed -- though all updates currently available are installed (Ubuntu 10.04 LTS). I'm still using wvdial as the Network Manager doesn't work; I've just checked it to be sure. I'm available for any further assistance you may need, but please keep in mind, that I have only very little programming skills. However, here's a 10y+ Debian user, running his Linux boxes for business purposes. For whatever this is worth...
It gets more complicated. If the device you have (a 5530, aka Ericsson F3507g) used PPP for data transport, this wouldn't be an issue. But instead the 5530 uses a pseudo-ethernet interface, and the password is sent to the modem because of this, instead of to pppd. Now, modems talk in specific character sets. Since the 5300/3507g handle the authentication internally, the user & password are sent to the modem and when they are sent, they are converted into the character set the modem is using at the time. That could be UTF-8 or UCS2, which is probably the source of these issues...
I think at this point we'd need to get modem-manager logs to see what specifically is getting sent to the modem. MM will prefer UTF-8 encoding if the modem supports it, otherwise UCS2. I'm pretty sure the Ericsson parts support UTF-8 so we should be using that by default and thus not have any problems. so: mv /usr/sbin/modem-manager / killall -TERM modem-manager /modem-manager --debug and then try to connect and we'll see what's going on.
Checking with a SonyEricsson MD300 (external USB dongle using same commands as F3507g) the device does support UTF-8 and MM selects UTF-8 as the command set. So for your modems, we'll need to see what character set MM is selecting using the procedure I mention in comment 10.
Attached please find the log as requested. Thanks for your effort!
Created attachment 186958 [details] Modem-manager log file
FYI: I occasionally found the following website [1], which seems to provide further info our issue. [1] http://natisbad.org/E4300/
I don't see anything interesting in the log. It seems like it does not succeed in connecting. Anyway it is hard to read the log because echo is enabled. Could you please try again using a newer version of NM/MM/Ubuntu?
Moving bugreport to the new ModemManager bugzilla in fd.o; summarized the issue there as well: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84978 Closing this report as NOTGNOME.