Hey folks, I just tried Connman and oFono on a Debian stretch system for the first time, hoping to get a more robust solution for keeping a cellular and/or ethernet connection up. It seems the duo is quite capable of doing what I need, but there were a few bumps in setting this up, where I think things could be improved.
Some of these issues might be more connman issues, but they're mostly on the cross-over area between the two, so I'll post them here for now. In somewhat chronological order: - I could not find any documentation on how to get a cellular connection up. Plugging in a dongle made the "cellular" technology appear in connman, but no services, with no indication of what needed to happen next. - When provisioning in oFono fails, a single gprs context is created without an APN. Setting the APN manually made the profile show up in connman and (eventually) work. It might be better to cange connman to create a service for a context without an APN, and show an error when trying to connect it, instead of completely hiding the context. - There does not seem to be any official commandline interface to ofono to figure out what is happening. There are "test" python scripts in the source repo, but these are not shipped in the Debian package (reported here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=868377) - When mobile-broadband-provider-info provision finds multiple matches for the operator (that is, multiple apns all with the same usage type), provisioning fails, disregarding *all* apns found. I believe this even happens when there is just one type duplicate (e.g. if multiple mms profiles are available and just one internet profile, the internet one is not used). Not entirely sure, though. - When multiple profiles match, it would not make sense for oFono to just pick an arbitrary one to use. Ideally, it would just create a context for each, and let the user select the right context. For this to actually work, the user must be able to distinguish them, and see all the relevant details for profile/context to allow choosing the right one. I tried simply passing "allow_duplicates=TRUE" to ..., which does indeed create all contexts, but seems to show only the first two as aservices in connman (not sure why just these two), and there is no way to really distinguish them (the service name is just the currently connected network name). - When actually connecting from connman (or activating a context using the ofono test/activate-context script), the reported errors are very unclear. I only got a "Not implemented" error, which is very non-descriptive and, looking at the code, is returned in quite some different places. There's also nothing in the log to indicate what went wrong. The activation error in my case was due to a missing tun kernel module, I submitted a separate patch for that. - I also ran into an issue where my modem was not properly detected at startup, debug output showed it couldn't detect the USB vidpid for some subdevices. I suspect there might be a race condition involved there, but I'm still investigating. Gr. Matthijs
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