Aitch wrote:Which Mifi device did you get?
The natty little black box says it's a
2352, and the manual says it could have been a
2372. Not sure what the difference is. I did read somewhere that it has
Huawei E5830 internals rather than those of the
E160E dongle which I have.
It also appears to have been available in black or silver. Mine is black.
Aitch wrote:I'm curious, as I posted a link earlier for the Huawei E5830 one used by Three in UK
Oh... I must have missed that
Aitch wrote:Good to see you got it working on 4.2.1, 4.3.1, and 2.14X - my 3 favourite puppies at the moment, but some tips on what you did would be useful
While it was running for the next few hours, I also tried an Aspire1 on which I have the four OS's I mentioned so I know it supports at least two WiFi connections nicely.
I didn't wish to waste time with the security stuff, particularly because I have found with a Netgear WG614 (v9) that there were difficulties in getting the three puppy versions mentioned connecting encrypted. 4.21 was more iffy than 4.31 in that regard.
Aitch wrote:Do you have full web admin access? - the Three version seems crippled, [?] and seemingly doesn't allow wep ar wpa/2 security, though there are reports of updating the firmware, and unlocking the device to get around this - I only have mine [very new acquisition] working on Windoze, atm
As mentioned, I didn't explore what I can do with it; almost all of my ISP's Adelaide customers had DSLAM failure which nobody has explained yet... but one suspects it was a problem associated with what is referred to as "the last mile" here - the length of copper conductor from the phone exchange mainframe to the customers, administered by "the only game in town" so to speak.
The chat rooms in which I'm an admin (in my spare time!) were having to be supervised by bots and personal clients on an old Toshiba laptop running WindowsXP SP2. So, hence my extremely fast "get-it-running-at-all costs" saga because of this situation which didn't need downtime longer than a few minutes.
I charged the battery (without inserting the SIM because the latter was in use) - the book says 4hrs initial charge - and it showed a solid LED charged indication after 2 hours.
About 30mins later (to ensure it was fully charged), I shut down the charger, shut down bots and chat clients, and pulled the 3G dongle from the WindowsXP home SP2 ancient Toshiba Satellite 1800 laptop, leaving the laptop idling.
Then removed the SIM from the dongle, removed the (now charged) battery from the MiFi, plugged SIM and then battery into MiFi (SIM sits under the battery), and pressed the power on button on the MiFi.
As soon as the MiFi LEDs announced its search had located a 3G signal and locked on (this is described in detail in the instruction booklet provided by manufacturer Novatel), I told the (Windows) laptop to go looking and it was quickly located and set as default, I restarted the bots and chat clients
It really was as simple as that!
Comments
I wrote to Internode later that evening giving them an update, and said a maximum of 15mins to do the change-over, but I suspect it was far, far, less.
Setting up to use the hotspot on the puppies mentioned was only slightly longer in duration than on WindowsXP... and was about the same length of time as in accessing a regular "proper" hotspot!
Actually it IS a proper hotspot lol
Once my regular ADSL connection was restored considerably later that night, I tried the same puppies on the Toshiba laptop and they performed similarly. Interestingly the D-Link PCMCIA WiFi identifies in puppies and PCLinuxOS as Atheros, which is what the Aspire1's claims to be. So that isn't as good a check as it might be.
The instruction book also tells you how to go about using it as a regular 3G device, but the WiFi side is disabled if you do that - which I thought was pretty pointless.
The ability exists to configure the device by both web browser and alternatively via a USB cable, but I didn't use either method as it self-configures nicely and quickly (without any security of course) on its own. WPA etc needs to be set up with either web or USB access.
There is a miniature card slot on the back which can be for any capacity up to 16Gb for storage of downloads etc - very useful when the 3G provider charges for the bandwidth in both directions. My ISP (who doesn't count uploads on its regular ADSL plans) have little choice but to pass on the charges from Optus who is the 3G carrier they use. So the card can be removed later and its contents copied across a regular LAN, etc.
I'm impressed actually at the simplicity of operation. A plus for non technical users, and it is ideally suited for converts to alternative OS's who could be discouraged if it wasn't simple. I've seen the expressions on their faces when something is sufficiently "different" to be a worry factor
.