Enable PAND

First, check /etc/sysconfig/bluetooth, and add this to the file if it is not already there:

PAND_ENABLED=1
PAND_OPTIONS="--role=PAN"

Restart the bluetooth service, or your computer if you can’t find the init.d script for it.

Install Blueman

First, install the “Blueman” program. It will put a bluetooth icon in your notification area. If you already have one, click both to check which is the blueman icon and which is provided by another bluetooth service. First of all, right click the blueman icon and go to local services. Click on network and select the “integrate with NetworkManager” option. Close this window.

Prepare the Phone

Browse to help.benm.at on your phone and select your country and carrier. After installing the carrier settings, reboot your phone. In Settings>General>Network, you should see an internet tethering option. If you don’t, reinstall the carrier settings and reboot again. When you get a notice about tethering not being activated and that you need to contact AT&T, close it and the menu should be activated. Go into the tethering menu and turn tethering on. Tethering has not been reported to add to your phone bill, so it is safe to ignore the warning if you get one. Now, go to your bluetooth menu (settings>general>bluetooth) turn bluetooth on and stay in the menu.

Back on the computer, click the blueman icon and click the search button.

You should see the phone. Select the phone then click the bond button. Make a passcode consisting of numbers, then when the phone asks you to input a passcode, enter the same code. Your phone and computer should now be paired.

Connect

Now that the phone and computer are paired, you can follow these steps whenever you want to connect to the phone.

Go to the bluetooth menu on the phone. Tap on the computer’s name. The first time you connect, you might get a notice about incoming authorization, as shown below, click “Check Authorization” and be sure to always grant access. This might not appear on subsequent connections.

Now, open blueman on the computer and right click the phone. Connect to network>network access. Wait a minute for network-manager to pick up on the connection, and you should be connected.

You can do other things with your phone while tethering is active. To stop tethering, you can just disconnect in blueman or turn bluetooth off on the phone. For your information, the network interface that is created will typically be bnep0, not the pan0 network interface that is already present in some systems.

If it doesn’t work, make sure your bluetooth is functioning correctly. If all else fails, unpair the iPhone on the computer and remove the computer from the iPhone’s list of bluetooth devices.

I’ll be writing some more OpenWRT stuff later, so you can subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter (@Mattventura) to hear more.

The scripts:

adhoc (switches wlan card into adhoc mode)


#!/bin/bash
#switches card into adhoc mode and sets up adhoc network
iwconfig wlan0 key off #this disables WEP. If you want WEP, read the iwconfig man page and change this line.
iwconfig wlan0 mode ad-hoc
iwconfig wlan0 essid ubuntu #replace this with your preferred ssid
ifconfig wlan0 192.168.1.112 #replace this with your preferred IP address. Be sure to give the phone an address that is in the same /24 subnet.


Second script, for switching back to your preferred wireless network (set by network-admin).

#!/bin/bash
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
sudo ifup --force wlan0


Note: If you are comfortable with using iwconfig, you can use that instead of steps 1 and 2.
The steps:

1. Switch your wlan card to roaming mode
2. In the wifi menu on the menu bar, create a new wireless network and secure it if you wish.
3. Connect the phone to the network.
4. Note the phone’s IP address.
5. Use ifconfig to give the computer a similar IP address
6. Install and run 3Proxy on the phone (I recommend stopping 3Proxy when not in use to save battery life)
7. Set Firefox to use the phone’s IP as a SOCKSv5 proxy.
8. In about:config, set network.proxy.socks_remote_dns to true if you want DNS queries to go through 3Proxy
9. Browse the web.

If you plan on doing this a lot, I recommend doing a few things:

• Give the phone a static IP for your ad-hoc network
• Make a separate Firefox profile for proxy use
• At the beginning of each month, reset your usage statistics. This way, you will be able to monitor your bandwidth so you don’t go over your carrier’s cap.

If things don’t work, try these steps in order:

1. Try pinging the phone. If you can’t, ensure the computer has an IP address, and try ifup –force wlan0 (or whatever your wlan interface is.)
2. Make sure the phone’s SOCKS server is still running. Try running it from a terminal or ssh session to check for errors
3. Make sure you set the option to forward DNS queries through SOCKS.

Sometimes, it just helps to start completely over on this one if all else fails.

If I can figure out how, I might write a script or something to do this, so please check my blog again soon.