Archive for February, 2010
Tethering Windows Mobile 6 with Ubuntu
Recently, I was using a laptop with Ubuntu installed. Anticipating that I might not have Wi-fi and needed to tether my Windows Mobile phone for Internet, I installed SynCE. I was in a rush and didn’t have time to really test it other than loading Google (isn’t that the “standard” test for Internet connectivity now? 
) As it turned out, the place I went to did have Wi-fi access, but I hadn’t installed the Wi-fi drivers for the laptop. To install the Wi-fi drivers, I would need to tether my phone.
Unfortunately I was facing a very strange situation. When I tethered my phone, the laptop did have Internet. But I couldn’t load anything other than the Google home page. I could ping, and I could do nslookup. I could wget the Google homepage consistently. But I couldn’t search or load any other pages. apt-get refused to work as well. I tried to FTP, and discovered that the connection would choke if I tried to do a directory listing of a large directory.
After much trying and Googling, I wondered if it had anything to do with the MTU. I Googled, and came across a forum post that suggested changing the MTU to 1000. I tried it, and… it worked!
I’m now happily tethering my Windows Mobile 6.1 phone with Ubuntu 9.10, using just SynCE + MTU 1000. 