More O2 mobile broadband dongle issues

Hi,

New to all this, but have looked through all the posts and cannot find this particular issue.

We are trying to connect my daughter's Acer Aspire one netbook to the Internet using an O2 dongle.

The Acer runs Linpus Linux Lite ver 1.0.21.E, all available updates have been downloaded.

We have found the settings from other posts, and have "sucessfully" installed using Mobile Partner, and can connect to the O2 payment page - and also make payment over this connection and get a confirmation email sent back to Mobile Partner mail page.

BUT - The problem that then arises is that Firefox cannot navigate away from the O2 payment page. Not even to Google. Get firefox page that says cannot find server.

The dongle works fine on a Vista laptop running IE, no problems accessing any site, so dongle is working OK?

The Acer works fine when conncted to my wireless network at home, so no problems with Firefox?

Does anyone have any ideas that can help, please?

Sounds like O2 aren't registering the payment properly .. which is going to be a job for O2 support .. :(

Hi Gareth,

Thanks for coming back on this. The payment is registered OK as the dongle can be taken out of the netbook and plugged into her laptop which is running Vista, and it works just fine.

Really she wants to use it with the netbook for portability, so that she does not have to lug her laptop around, and looking at other posts on this forum, some members have had success in getting the Aspire one on line using the dongle.

It looks to me as though it is something to do with the linux version of Firefox not accessing the connection. There are no problems with Firefox though when the Aspire is connected to my wireless LAN.

The connection was set up using the Mobile Partner connection software supplied with Linpus. As far as we could see, this was working and allowed us to make a payment over the connection and we got a confirmation email back to the Aspire.

Problem seems to be that Firefox does not navigate to any other page than the O2 page, even with typed web addresses.  Do you think that we should have set up the connection using the connection settings like we did to access my LAN?  (Sorry for being a bit vague - she has gone back home now, so I don't have machine with me at the moment).

We could not find settings to do this, as we only had settings options for either ethernet or Wifi connections. The 3g connection setting seemed to refer to the option for an internal sim card, which is not fitted. I understand that Linux identifies the dongle as a modem? But is it connected as a wifi or ethernet connection?

Thanks again,

Allan

Ok, well the major caveat here is that I've never even seen an Aspire nor have I used Linpus .. however ..

Firefox doesn't "know" about different network connection types, so if it worked on a WiFi or wired connection, then it's unlikey be a Firefox issue - unless you have a proxy set up in Firefox. (if you do, clear it)

Given you can get to O2, then it seems the mobile connection is working. The way these pay before you use gateways "usually" work (WiFi in hotel rooms for example) is to use a proxy server (Squid for example) to catch "all" traffic trying to pass though it and either redirect it to a payment page if the user has not paid, or to transparently proxy it if they have.

If you can't get off the payment page, it would indicate a fault with this proxy server. i.e. that it's not recognising the fact you've paid and as a result not routing your traffic correctly.

So .. if it works with Windows, it would look like a compatibility issue between their payment system and the Acer ..

Couple of tests you could run from a terminal session;

ping linux.co.uk

Does this work?

tracepath linux.co.uk

What does this give?

wget -S linux.co.uk

What does this give? (this should 'expose' whether a proxy is being used)

Hello Allan,

Don't know if you fixed this but I had the identical problem yesterday after setting up mobile partner.  Today I plugged the dongle into my other laptop and it worked OK so put it back in the acer and re-booted and  this time it worked OK... Could it be a timing problem on O2 website?

Anyway I've been connected through dongle all day and worked fine...

Regards, Gavin