Make a 4G USB (Huawei e3372h-153) dongle work

[deb2016]

Hello,

 

I run a clearfogpro, this problem is not board specific, but I would like to use

a huawei e3372h-153 USB 4G dongle on this board which has a USB3 port.

 

The current version of armbian is Debian Buster  Linux 4.14.135-mvebu.

 

This dongle is in stick mode, as opposed to the hilink mode. In stick mode,

when plugging the dongle, two devices appear : /dev/ttyUSB0 and /dev/cdc-ncm1.

With the former I can issue AT commands to the dongle, the latter is the modem itself with the NCM protocol, known to be faster than PPP.

 

There is also an wwan interface appearing with ifconfig -a.

 

However, I do not know how to configure this interface that is to say what to put into /etc/network/interface

 

I googled on internet and within this forum but nothing showed up so far very useful.

 

Did someone already had to configure such a device ?

 

Regards

[Igor]

@Stanislav Sinyagin could know but he was not seen for a while. But still, this might help: https://github.com/ssinyagin/wwan_udev_rules

[deb2016]

Hi,

 

Thanks for your answeer.

 

I finally got it working at least on my laptop, should be the same on clearfogpro.

 

It is quite simple in fact :

1. connect the modem with mmcli : mmcli -m <modem index> --simple-connect="apn=yourapn"

2. with "ifconfig -a" you will notice you have a ww*** interface, to which you can connect by configuring

    it into /etc/network/interfaces with dhcp

 

Just the trouble at the moment is that in doing so, I do not get any dns server, cannot figure out why yet

[Igor]

5 minutes ago, deb2016 said:

I do not get any dns server, cannot figure out why yet

Now this can be related to (buggy) Network manager. IMO best quick test would be by going with a Focal build. It has little to nothing connection to Canonical Ubuntu ... if you are Debian type of person and that might bother you.

[deb2016]

Currently, it is not working yet on clearfogpro as well as on my laptop because it appears that one kernel module is missing : huawei_cdc_ncm

 

grep HUA /boot/config-4.14.135-mvebu

 CONFIG_USB_NET_HUAWEI_CDC_NCM is not set

 

My current kernel is Linux 4.14.135-mvebu.

 

Is there any reason for the huawei module not being compiled ? How could I remedy to this ?

 

aptitude search linux-image

...

p   linux-image-current-mvebu                    - Linux kernel, version 5.10.21-mvebu                     

...

 

Do you know if this module is included in newer kernels ?

 

Regards

[deb2016]

I installed linux-image-current-mvebu.

 

I have a sata card on pcie1 and a wifi card on pcie2 (closest to cpu).

 

It is strange, after booting, I had no more wifi access point running on the pcie2 card.

 

The wifi interface 'wlp2s0' was gone but the card seems to be recognized : lspci :

00:02.0 PCI bridge: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 6828 (rev 04)

00:03.0 PCI bridge: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 6828 (rev 04)

01:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 9215 (rev 11)

02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA986x/988x 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter

 

I had to downgrade to linux-image-legacy-mvebu, but this one does not have the huawei_cdc_ncm module.

 

I know that there are some issues with pci slots for the clearfogpro. I looked into the test matrix, it should work.

 

How can I do to make the wifi interface appear with linux-image-current-mvebu ?

 

Thanks in advance for your help

 

Regards

[deb2016]

I have installed linux-image-current-mvebu and linux-dtb-current-mvebu.

 

My wifi card is recognized : lspci

 

00:02.0 PCI bridge: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 6828 (rev 04)

00:03.0 PCI bridge: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 6828 (rev 04)

01:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. Device 9215 (rev 11)

02:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros QCA986x/988x 802.11ac Wireless Network Adapter (rev ff)

 

But I have this error in logs :

 

[ 1989.796887] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: of_irq_parse_pci: failed with rc=134

[ 1989.796895] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: assign IRQ: got 0

[ 1989.814365] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: can't change power state from D3hot to D0 (config space inaccessible)

[ 1989.844551] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: failed to wake up device : -110

[ 1989.846602] ath10k_pci 0000:02:00.0: disabling bus mastering

[ 1989.846770] ath10k_pci: probe of 0000:02:00.0 failed with error -110

 

I googled some of these lines, it seems a known problem, so not due to clearfogpro, but rather to the kernel.

 

However, up to now, I could not find a workaround. Does someone use this wifi card with the current kernel (5.x.xx) ?

 

Regards

 

 

[deb2016]

Wifi is fixed by adding "pcie_aspm=off" to kernel parameters : added "extraargs=pcie_aspm=off" in armbianEnv.txt and recompiled boot.scr as advocated in boot.cmd

 

I hope this is the right fix for this issue and that this parameter will not affect other parts of the hardware.

 

Regards

[Heisath]

Yeah that should be right. A ran into similiar errors when using some PCIe devices with newer kernels.