From: Martin Howard (mvhoward_at_mac.com)
Date: Sun Aug 01 2004 - 22:45:37 PDT
I recently moved within the same town and I've concluded that my new
apartment must lie right at the intersection of a spacetime-continuum
rift and commonly used frequency spectra for wireless communications.
As an example: I have an Airport Express sitting not 20ft from my
TiBook and my Airport menu status indicator typically shows 100% signal
strength (as one would expect). Except every now and then, when it
completely looses sight of the Airport signal altogether. Zip. Nada.
Zilch. There are no other airport signals (except my AP basestation)
in range and I don't have a microwave or a 2.4 GHz phone. My
neighbours might... but I find it hard to believe that they are closer
to my AP than I am, given the layout of these apartments.
What does this have to do with the Newton? Well... after three days of
trying every conceivable combination of drivers, driver versions,
hardware, and software, to get the MP 2100 with the BF2000E card to
connect via a T39 using PPP, and never once managing to get my MP 2100
to get beyond the "Loading PPP driver..." at which point it would reset
itself... it suddenly, magically, out of thin, blue air, decided to
successfully load the driver and talk to the phone.
Up to this point, things I had tried included wiping all extensions and
setup programs from the memory and reinstalling them; removing all
setups and reconfiguring them from scratch; ensuring that PPP worked
across a serial line (it did); ensuring that PPP worked across the IrDA
connection (it did). The most immediate things I had done before it
decided to work was to reinstall the NIE Modem & Serial Support package
that I had used before installing 40Hz's patched version which I used
to play with Nitro to see if I could connect to the phone that way. In
other words: I went back to the previous configuration which I had
established didn't work. Go figure.
Since the one and only thing that has proven consistently successful in
getting me one step closer to making this work has been to send an
email to either NTLK or the support email address, after which a
solution has magically presented itself before any replies have come
in, I'm now resorting in desparation to that same tactic. Without, I
may add, much faith in its reproducibility.
The status of things is this: The MP2100 and T39 are successfully
paired and talk to each other. The PPP driver loads and sends the
appropriate commands (via the login/dialup script) to the phone. The
phone starts to establish the connection to my ISP (T-Mobile in the
USA). And that's where it stops. The login script ends, I get the
"Engaging the PPP driver..." status message, and then it fails with one
of two error messages: Either "An error occurred in Open Link. A
communications problem occurred. Connection may have been dropped.
Error = -16013"; or that authentication failed and that I should check
my username and password (T-Mobile does *not* use usernames or
passwords -- authentication is done using the SIM card in the phone,
not in a PPP connect script).
Here's the bizarre part: The *exact* same login script successfully
establishes a PPP session with the T39 over Bluetooth using my TiBook.
I use the "Connect using a terminal window" PPP-option in OS X to
ensure that nothing additional, extra, or magical is being sent and the
very same script works.
I do realize that it is currently a full moon here on the West Coast of
the US... but this is approaching the ridiculous.
The only thing I can think of is this: When using this setup in OS X,
you are advised to turn the "Send echo PPP packets" off in the
PPP-options. There is no such checkbox anywhere (that I've found) in
the Blunt/NIE2.0 setup dialogues. Is there any other way of acheiving
this?
M.
PS: For those of you who might be interested, my login script looks
like this:
Send: AT&FE0S0=0
Send CR
Wait for: OK
Send: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","internet2.voicestream.com"
Send CR
Wait for: OK
Send: ATD*99#
Send CR
Wait for: CONNECT
Done
-- This is the NewtonTalk list - http://www.newtontalk.net/ for all inquiries Official Newton FAQ: http://www.chuma.org/newton/faq/ WikiWikiNewt for all kinds of articles: http://tools.unna.org/wikiwikinewt/
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Aug 06 2004 - 10:28:51 PDT