Motorola Triumph Wifi Hotspot Tethering

**pocketpenguin** · 07-17-2011, 12:33 PM

First off, I'm not advocating using your new MT as your home ISP. This thread is not intended to discuss the right or wrong of wifi tethering. People will do it, and I want to discuss how to set it up so that it is available as a backup to other wifi connectivity. In my line of work I, on rare occasion, need to connect to work from a remote location to fix servers etc. I'd like to be able to do that reliably with my MT so that I don't have to carry extra equipment and don't have to have yet-another-costly, but seldom used, piece of tech.

So the current state of wifi hotspot tethering from all the posts I could find in the 130+page master MT thread follows...

The Quick Settings application trick that works on the Optimus V DOES NOT WORK on the Motorola Triumph. When you click the wifi-hotspot entry in Quick Settings, you get nothing.

It appears that installing other wifi tether hotspot apps from the marketplace first requires rooting your device.

You can do this by running the latest GingerBreak 1.2 apk. Use google to track that down over on xda-developers. This process is relatively simple, I downloaded the .apk to my PC, hooked up my MT via USB and copied the Gingerbreak apk to the SD "drive" on my PC. I then downloaded ES File Explorer from the market. In ES File Explorer, I tapped the Gingerbreak .apk file, installed it, followed the instructions and ran it. I now have a rooted MT.

My next step was to try a couple of the wifi tethering apps from the marketplace.

Here's what I found:

Wifi Tether (googlecode):
Download Wifi Tether from the googlecode site (google for it). Install the 2.07 release version .apk.
What I found:
I tried it and got associated with the MT, but nothing else. I gave up and moved to the 3.1.beta2 version. Again no luck. After the screen timed out on my MT, I lost my connection, could not wake the MT back up and couldn't even restart the MT. I had to remove the battery to restart. This has happened with both the 2.07 and 3.1.beta2 version. So much for wifi tether.

Barnacle Wifi-Tether
Download Barnacle from the marketplace (after rooting). Check "Skip wpa_supplicant" in settings. Start up. Connect your laptop (Win7) to the default AndroidAP set up by Barnacle. I had to change my DNS servers to Google's (8.8.8.8 and 4.4.4.4) to get DNS resolution. I had to do this when I tethered with my Optimus too.
What I found:
It sort of works. With Barnacle I get my laptop connected fine and my browser has VERY fast access to any google site I've tried, but nothing else. Gmail works, images.google.com (surprisingly fast), search, everything google. No other sites work. All connections to other sites appear to timeout at the network layer, as if the site cannot be reached. When I look at traffic stats in Barnacle I see nearly constant but very small upload traffic, and download traffic only when I go to a page.

OK, what have we learned from this?
There is definitely something different between the MT and Optimus V. The fact that google sites are available, but others are consistently not on the MT implies that some sort of filtering is occuring. The question is where is this filtering taking place?

If the filtering is on the MT, then I suspect that a change to the ROM or the tether apps will be necessary to achieve a working tether experience.

If the filtering is on the VirginMobile servers, then we may be out of luck. However I don't think the filtering is there. Why? Because the Optimus tethering still works as before. Though I suppose that VM could have different routers/access points for the two phones.

I've configured linux routers/firewalls and networking many times before, but I know little about android, if anyone has pointers at debugging this issue on the MT (other than doing things that could brick my MT) I'm ready to dive in.

Has anyone else gotten wifi tethering working with websites other than Google?

**juxxx** · 07-17-2011, 12:56 PM

What happens when you do a nslookup for a non-google host name? If it doesn't return a correct ip then it could be as simple as dns settings.

**pocketpenguin** · 07-17-2011, 01:04 PM

Nslookup works fine, but I've manually pointed my windows tcp/ip dns settings at google's public DNS servers. This was necessary on my Optimus V as well.

**heatdepot** · 07-17-2011, 01:19 PM

Sounds complicated.

I guess I'm keeping my Optimus.

**HF305** · 07-17-2011, 01:21 PM

You could take DNS out of consideration entirely by entering the numeric IP of a non-Google site (are there any left?) into your browser instead of the name. For example

69.147.125.65 should be yahoo.
12.129.147.65 washingtonpost.com

**juxxx** · 07-17-2011, 01:29 PM

Originally Posted by HF305

You could take DNS out of consideration entirely by entering the numeric IP of a non-Google site (are there any left?) into your browser instead of the name. For example

69.147.125.65 should be yahoo.
12.129.147.65 washingtonpost.com

Right, if your dns does return these addresses correctly then i'd try to ping the ip directly as suggested, if that doesn't work then perhaps run a tracert to find out where it got stuck.

It's unlikely they are somehow filtering the traffic externally as there is really no way for them to determine if your traffic was tethered or otherwise.

**pocketpenguin** · 07-17-2011, 01:47 PM

I've tried looking up numerous hosts with nslookup, using both UDP (the default) protocol and tcp (using the vc switch). Both work fine the IP addresses are correct. The issue is definitely not DNS resolution.

**pocketpenguin** · 07-17-2011, 02:03 PM

C:\>ping www.yahoo.com

Pinging any-fp.wa1.b.yahoo.com [209.191.122.70] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 209.191.122.70: bytes=32 time=197ms TTL=49
Request timed out.
Reply from 209.191.122.70: bytes=32 time=142ms TTL=49
Reply from 209.191.122.70: bytes=32 time=187ms TTL=49

Ping statistics for 209.191.122.70:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 3, Lost = 1 (25% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 142ms, Maximum = 197ms, Average = 175ms

However attempting to connect on http to 209.191.122.70 didn't work.

Part of the problem is that many of these tools use different protocols. DNS queries are usually udp, sometimes tcp, tracert and ping are icmp, and web traffic is always TCP. Each can and often do have different filtering.

I'll start some debugging and troubleshooting in more earnest when the world cup is over

.

**ziddey** · 07-17-2011, 02:41 PM

i wonder about simply setting up a ssh server on the phone and tunneling through that

**arp734** · 07-17-2011, 07:49 PM

What about hotspots widget? Or pdanet?

Sent from my VM670 using HowardForums

**pocketpenguin** · 07-17-2011, 11:45 PM

Which hotspots widget are you referring to? There are several in the market place. The three that I downloaded simply are quick-links to the wifi-hotspot setting, which appears to be disabled on the MT.

PDANet is a usb tether only I believe. Not quite what I'm after.

While I'm posting, I downloaded an SSH daemon and have started rooting around the MT looking for options. Haven't found what I'm looking for yet. As far as SSHing to the MT and tunneling out, or SSHing and debugging while running Barnacle... It doesn't work. As soon as you enable the wifi tethering bits, it drops your existing wifi connection and sshd closes.

I tried doing adb, but the MT has it disabled too.

**ambeardo** · 07-20-2011, 12:44 AM

Any new discoveries? I'm hopefully getting mine today so I'll see if I can figure out anything.

**bobloadmire** · 07-20-2011, 11:22 AM

bumpity bump, want to know as well. I did get the barnicle working as described, but being able to access more than google would be swell. swell i say indeed.

**Siberian2007** · 07-20-2011, 01:03 PM

I tried to use PDANet Bluetooth tethering to hook ASUS Transformer to MT using PDANet app for tablets (beta version). The tablet was connected to the phone, but there was no internet connection.

**GTwannabe** · 07-20-2011, 01:43 PM

Originally Posted by juxxx

Right, if your dns does return these addresses correctly then i'd try to ping the ip directly as suggested, if that doesn't work then perhaps run a tracert to find out where it got stuck.

It's unlikely they are somehow filtering the traffic externally as there is really no way for them to determine if your traffic was tethered or otherwise.

Yeah, Barnacle traffic runs through NAT, so VM's servers can't tell if it's web traffic from the phone or web traffic from a NAT'd device.

What does the DNS setting on the tethered device default to? Should be 68.something and reverse DNS should indicate something along the lines of spcs (Sprint PCS)