Computers can do so much these days, or can they? Some things are just too hard to set up for the basic need they address.
I spent a significant chunk of this evening configuring my laptop to use my GPRS mobile phone as a modem. It’s a Sony Ericsson P910i. The Google employee ski-trip is coming up a couple of days from now and it’ll be nice to be able to get on-line from the hotel room; or the bus on the way up, for that matter. Yes, it’s sad, but I like to be able to get on-line at the drop of a hat and Opera on my phone just doesn’t cut it. Using the command line over ssh is even worse, as the phone’s keyboard is too awkward to use and doesn’t even support the sending of control characters.
Anyway, after recompiling my kernel to support Bluetooth (how’d that happen? I was using Bluetooth three months ago and I had support configured in then.), I configured Bluetooth support. This involved scanning for my phone, picking up its MAC address, querying it to find out on which channel it supports DUN (dial-up networking), and then binding the Bluetooth RFCOMM system to that channel, which gave me a /dev/rfcomm0 device to play with.
Then it was a simple (simple?) matter of running pppd over that device. pppd is one of those pain-in-the-arse programs that is just never simple to configure or debug. chat scripts full of Hayes AT commands; lots of low level options to mess with; copious debugging output to wade through; configuration scripts that are called after a connection is established. And then the damn thing fails to write a /etc/ppp/resolv.conf, so I have to do it manually.
Why can’t things be easier? I first configured pppd back in 1995, if I remember correctly. Now, some 10 years on, you’d think I’d be an expert, but some things just remain hard, because you never really use them enough to build up expertise with them.
I’m reminded of 1997, when I wrestled endlessly to get ipppd (the synchronous version of pppd) working with a passive Teles ISDN card plugged into one of my ISA slots. What an unbelievable amount of hassle that was to get working. Ethernet is very simple by comparison.
But I digress. Computers are still in their infancy, really. Yes, they can do a lot, but we humans have to do an awful lot to get our computers to do anything. And I should smile, really, because it’s the fact that not everyone has knowledge about such things that keeps people like me in demand with employers. Ideally, though, things would be different and everything would just work.
Anyway, like most computer users, I eventually got the thing I was messing around with to work. I’ll now have Internet access from the hotel room in Tahoe, assuming my phone has reception in that area.
Cool story.