I bough a UMTS stick from O2 / Tchibo mobil just two weeks ago, and so far it’s been great – love the new-found freedom. Alas, it didn’t survive my otherwise smooth and painless upgrade to OSX 10.6 Snow Leopard – its ugly “Mobile Partner” application kept crashing on me.
This is how I got my Huawei E160 (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?) UMTS stick back to work:
- forget about the crashing software – the dialer included in Snow Leopard is all you need
- open Terminal.app and login as root user by typing
sudo -sand entering your user account password - as the user root, open a text editor to create a new file by typing
nano /etc/ppp/options - put these two lines in the file:
+pap
-chap
then save by pressing CTRL-O and exit with CTRL-X. You can now close Terminal.app - open Snow Leopards network preferences pane. There should already be an entry in there for your 3G USB stick named HUAWEI… – select it to see its settings
- “Telephone number” should be *99#, “Account name” and “Password” should be blank:
- Click “Advanced” and make sure Other / Huawei Mobile Connect 3G is the selected modem:
That’s it! If you’ve fiddled around before trying this, you might want unplug and replug the stick once, but after that, you should be able to connect just fine.
Thanks to horrie66 from the Whirlpool user forums for the info!
16 Responses to “How to fix your 3G USB stick in Snow Leopard”
Wo gibst du dort die APN ein und wo die Pin?
PIN ist eine gute Frage – ich habe meine noch unter Leopard deaktiviert. Sorry, keine Ahnung.
Einen APN musste ich gar nicht setzen, was mich auch etwas verwundert hat; möglicherweise gibt es unterschiedliche Treiber für unterschiedliche Provider, denn andere schreiben, sie hätten die APN-Einstellungen unter dem “Advanced”-Button.
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You’ve just saved my sanity. Thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you!
I’m glad to hear it worked for you! I figured my own sanity was a high enough price already, so I’d spare others the same fate
P.S. – lovely mail address! Didn’t catch that at first.
Mac OS X Snow Leopard installiert: Probleme mit UMTS-Sticks?…
Inzwischen habe ich Mac OS X Snow Leopard installiert. Dem ganzen gingen diverse Updates und Backups voraus, denn ich wollte von der gerade aktuellen Mac OS X-Version (10.5.8) auf das neue Betriebssystem Snow Leopard (10.6) aktualisieren und zwischendu…
Just to let you know that this process worked great for me!
Don’t know if it was the terminal commands (Never dabbled with terminal before,) but when I got the advanced settings in the network preferences, I noticed that mine were all different. Swapped them over and everything connected first time!
I’ll be sure to let people know where I found the fix
Now I just need to find out if I can switch back to 64 bit operations as well?
Thanks!!!
Martin
Nope. 64 Bit operations don’t recognise the E170 stick! Got the same message as before, thought I’d undone all of the good work!!
Oh well, I’ll have to wait a bit longer before I can make the full switch.
Martin
Can you tell me a little bit more about what you’re trying to achieve? I’m not quite sure where you are going at the moment..
The topic of “32 bit vs. 64 bit” in Snow Leopard isn’t as clear cut as the glossy marketing brochures make it seem. Most likely, your Mac isn’t running in full 64 bit anyway; to the best of my knowledge, only Apples Xserve servers get the full 64 bit setup at the moment.
Take a look at A Hat full of sky – there’s a lot of great information on this topic, as well as a nice, downloadable program that tells you which mode(s) your Mac is actually running in.
I’m assuming this is to fix 32bit? Does anyone know how to fix the stick for 64? I heard today that 10.6.2 is being released soon. Does anyone have any fix details for it?
All I did was working around the crashy Mobile Partner GUI, so if the stick driver itself doesn’t work for you on 64bit, then I’m afraid you’re still out of luck.
But in that case, a Mac OS update will not help you either, since the issue is with the third-party driver. Are you running the 64bit kernel? You can find out in System Profiler under “Software / 64-bit Kernel and Extensions”.
Thanks!
I just talked my daughter through fixing her Snow Leopard MacBook with your instructions!
C
Works well now on Snow Leopard (64bit) 10.6.2 . You can download the necessary drivers and installers from this website:
http://www.huaweidevice.com/resource/mini/200910149695/testmobile1014/index.html?directoryId=3874&treeId=0
You will need to install the Mobile Partner app using dashboard in your applications folder. Somehow, it did not complete installation when I was trying to do it without using the dashboard.
In the end it was pretty easy and painless.
Hi there,
I realise this post was made a long time but I really hope you’re still somehow monitoring the comments… The thing is I had this problem and I tried your solution (even though I have absolutely no idea of how to work with Terminal), and well, it didn’t work. The problem is that now Huawei has released a driver for Snow Leopard and I keep getting a message saying there’s an error with the PPP settings. I can’t help but think that tinkering around with this is what’s causing me all this trouble. So I just want to know, is there any way for me to undo this whole /etc/ppp/options settings? Thanks a lot in advance.
Hi Maky,
I’ll try to walk you through it via mail; give me fifteen minutes or so…