# Any News on USB Tethering?



## MasterOne (Dec 13, 2012)

Has anybody ever got USB tethering working under FreeBSD?

I have seen it on a netbook running a version of Ubuntu Linux with network-manager, it was as simple as connecting an Android mobile phone with an USB cabel to the netbook and turning on USB Tethering in the Android network configuration menu, network-manager did the rest automatically treating the USB connection as wired networking, so no further configuration on the netbook required.

It has the advantage of using less energy than using the Android mobile phone as WLAN hotspot, so I would pretty much prefer that method.

There was some talk about the if_cdce kernel module, but the last discussion about USB tethering ended in August without definitive result.

So any news on that subject?


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## SirDice (Dec 14, 2012)

Most phones can show up as a bog standard serial modem. You can then simply open a ppp(8) connection, dialling to a special phone number. This is usually *99#.


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## MasterOne (Dec 14, 2012)

I honestly have no idea, but I guess USB tethering = USB connection sharing uses a completely different mechanism than a simple "treat mobile phone as modem" approach.

I did not take a closer look when I saw it working with the mentioned *Ubuntu netbook + Android mobile phone, but network-manager simply showed the symbol of a wired connection after plugging in the phone, and no further configuration was required (which would have been in the case of a ppp dialup).

I'd like to try FreeBSD on an Acer AspireOne 753 "netbook" and would like to use such simple USB tethering by connecting my Android mobile phone, but searching for "FreeBSD USB Tethering" did not result in any useful info.


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## SirDice (Dec 14, 2012)

See if you can get it to show up as ucom(4). That will give you the aforementioned "modem". Once you have that the PPP connection is relatively easy to set up. It usually doesn't require a username and password and the phone number is standard. This is probably why it doesn't need much configuring on Ubuntu.


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## MasterOne (Dec 14, 2012)

Ok, that shouldn't be that hard to accomplish, but what about the if_cdce approach? Wouldn't it be even easier to go that route?

There are some options to get it run somehow, worst case would be to use the Android mobile phone as WLAN hotspot, but the simpler it gets, the better.


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## SirDice (Dec 14, 2012)

I think it depends entirely on the phone whether or not it supports USB-to-Ethernet. Not really sure, I've never played with it.


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## MasterOne (Dec 21, 2012)

Somehow I just stumbled over the urndis - USB Remote NDIS Ethernet device in OpenBSD, for which the manpage explicitly mentions "USB tethering", and which isn't really new (they already have it since OpenBSD 4.7).


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