iPhone Tethering on BT5

Hi guys,

I was trying to tether my iPhone 3G with iOS 4.1. I installed the ipheth-utils and managed to see the iphone attached message with "dmesg | grep iPhone" although device notifier never sees the phone. Also I was able to get the eth1 listed under ifconfig and I get the blue tethering visuals on my phone.

However I get no IP from the phone for my eth1 interface and static IPs don't work. Any ideas on how to get it working?

To give a better picture of what I was trying to do let me outline the steps I've followed.

First I tried installing the iphet-utils as was shown in several Ubuntu 10.04 iPhone Tethering how-to tutorials:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pmcenery/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install gvfs ipheth-utils

This let me to plug the iPhone, see the network interface as Eth1 but I wasn't able to get an IP address. I tried to start the DHCP with "dhclient eth1" but got a timeout. Tried a static IP too but wasn't successful (couldn't reach anywhere on the network)

Then I tried the manual way as was shown in the same tutorials.
sudo apt-get install build-essential ifuse git-core libimobiledevice-dev
git clone git://github.com/dgiagio/ipheth.git
cd ipheth-pair
make
sudo make install
cd ../ipheth-driver
make

But when I try to build the driver I get the "/lib/modules/2.6.8/build: No such file or directory" error. Indeed there is no build directory there but why?

Have anyone else tried this?

Perhaps a silly question, but do you have a data package plan that supports tethering? Also, I've read where tethering only applied to the iphone4.

Do you currently get data on the phone (standalone)? Do you have a data plan? Have you checked the phone's APN (access point name) settings?

Yes I have a data plan and I can use tethering from a Mac. However my Googling revealed that I may not have the kernel sources to be able to install device drivers. There is an entry in the wiki called "How to prepare BT5 kernel sources". I will try that and then post the results here but I feel like that's going to solve the problem.

Ok, figured out how to do it. Since it's the beginners forum I assume I can post a how-to in regards to my own question.

The problem was I didn't have the kernel headers to be able to install drivers thus I wasn't able to use my iDevice properly. So first install the kernel headers:

prepare-kernel-sources
cd /usr/src/linux
cp -rf include/generated/* include/linux/

Install other necessary packages:

apt-get install build-essential ifuse git-core libimobiledevice-dev

Then to install the iPhone drivers and the pairing device:

git clone git://github.com/dgiagio/ipheth.git
cd ipheth-pair
make
sudo make install
cd ../ipheth-driver
make
insmod ipheth.ko

Plug your phone in and you should be good to go!

Great to hear you got it going :) I suggest posting this in the how-to forum, also.

Thanks mrYoda, your guide worked perfectly, makes MyWi just as easy to use as on Windows 7.

Hey guys,

I had used the above code without problems up until recent upgrade to IOS5. May or may not be related. At any rate, is anyone else having problems tethering BT5 to their iphone running IOS5? Do you know or have a work around? Thanks.

...not sure the small change required for kernel 3.2.6 is documented anywhere:

the steps documented here worked for me (BT5R2 Kernel 3.2.6, updated Apr 12 2012 - iPhone 3G/iOS 4.1).

It should work for iPhone 4S/iOS 5 as well, but I haven't tested that.