Babar Haq

Thursday, August 23, 2007

Warid GPRS on linux with Nokia 6020

For the past few months the only time I would boot in Windows would be to connect my GPRS using Nokia PC suite.My first few attempts to connect GPRS on Linux were using gprseasyconnect software. Unfortunately warid pakistan gprs service is not listed in their gprs providers drop down list. I tried pretty hard to add warid as a provider by editing their *.apn files but was in vain.Finally I planned to work on things manually.

Luckily my Nokia 6020 connects to Dell Latitude D400's serial port via DKU-5 cable. I said luckily because I always find serial port stuff easy to configure on Linux, e.g modems. My nokia phone was available to me on my ubuntu 6.06 under /dev/ttyS0 which is also known as COM1 in windows.First thing I did was I booted into Windows and opened the dial up connection created by Nokia PC suite. The number it dialed was *99#.To dial out I needed a dialer. I installed gnome-ppp using synaptic package manager and configured the modem to /dev/ttyS0. Now when I dialed out the gnome-ppp dialer after initializing the modem would get stuck on sending password.From here I jumped on to even lower level dialer that is wvdial. I started out with the default wvdial.conf and just changed the dialup number to *99#.This time everything went fine except when the mobile tried to create the GPRS connection it would fail with a message saying something like "GPRS: Invalid GPRS access point".I do not remember the exact message though.Upon googling a little I found a different number to dial *99***1#. The digit 1 represented the GPRS setting to be picked up from the mobile. Probably these nokia phones have index number of every GPRS setting you save in your mobile. Wonder why doesent it try the default one.The sad part was that this failed as well.Eventually I found this. Using this I crafted out a new wvdial.conf which got me conncted!

Here is my final wvdial.conf connecting me to warid GPRS

[Dialer Defaults]
Modem = /dev/ttyS0
Baud = 115200
Init1 = ATH
Init2 = ATE1
Init3 = AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","wap.warid","0.0.0.0",0,0
Phone = *99#
Username = A
Password = B

The username and password are are dumy values. Thats all.

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