I'm building a router for the wireless network in my Chevy (two kids, "we want to be on MSN while driving", not to mention no more "are we there yet" when they are busy), and I have used an old 12V VIA C3 computer as the basis. But I have one problem: I can't get the 3G part to work. I know it can see my Huawei, and I suppose it's probably a small idiot mistake, but in the monitor I have connected to the VIA I see this:

But when I try to edit the WAN properties (I use the web interface, btw if that matters, and I have installed all the necessary packages), I see this:

I have tried /dev/usb/tts/0 and up to 2 (like in the guide from Josefsson.org) or /dev/ttyUSB0 and up to 2 (which is suggested in the web GUI). Does anybody see a glaring mistake there?

The error is triggered if the /dev/ path you entered does not exist. Also your usb serial is only actually working if you see something like

39.096298] usb 1-4: ark3116 converter now attached to ttyUSB0

appears in dmesg. The lines you see just tell that the corresponding driver is loaded but not that actual hardware was found.

In many cases it is required to edit /etc/modules/xy-usbserial. The options "vendor=0x..." and "product=0x..." must be added there.
You can find the appropriate IDs for your device with "lsusb".

~ JoW

Thank you very much! That worked! The only word in the file was "usbserial", so I added "vendor=0×12d1 product=0×1003 maxSize=4096". That did the trick.

Another question, since you obviously really know what you're talking about (developers often do...): I have a boot time of around 2 minutes on this system (VIA C3, Kingston 256 meg CF card, 256 meg RAM). It does seem a bit slow to me, but is it? Since this system will be in the car it can't be on all the time, or it will eat up the battery. So I have to fire it up when the car starts, and I would like that to be faster. Would it help much to drop the CF card and put in a hard drive instead? Or is this the time it takes? It seems to wait a lot for DMA, even though I have turned off the DMA option in the BIOS. That didn't change the boot time, though.

Edit: I tried to set it up on an old AMD Athlon 2.6 with an old laptop hard drive and installed all the same stuff. That booted in 30 seconds. But of course that's a much faster CPU. So is this the CPU or the drive? For some reason I couldn't get the VIA to boot with a hard drive. It said "Be patient and wait for OpenWRT to start", or something like that. For 20 minutes. Then I gave up.

(Last edited by Mastiff on 8 Oct 2009, 12:31)