Some mail arrived for me today, the Bluetooth dongle I got off eBay the other day, and a TiVo NIC, sent from Melbourne.

I went in to get my mail, Dad said he couldn't access one of the machines on the LAN still, even though I setup the DMZ pinholes in IPCop for it.

I tried to fix the issue, but in the end I put it down to the fact that the other machine, on the LAN, is running windows 98, and wants to use NetBIOS, which isn't being routed between the subnets.

I figure I need to rebuild the machine that acts as a WINS server, I think that was how the subnetting SMB worked before.

I came back out, and I mucked around with the Bluetooth adapter a bit. I'm supposed to give it to my mate, that's why I got it, but I wanted to check that it worked, and that I'd compiled kernel support for it, when I rebuilt the kernel with a ton of modules I didn't need the other day.

I plugged it in, and checked dmesg, saw:

usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 2
Bluetooth: HCI USB driver ver 2.8
usbcore: registered new driver hci_usb

I googled around a bit, trying to work out what I needed.

I figured I needed the "bluez" stuff, so I search the apt lists, and installed "bluez-tools".

It came up with an error starting the hci daemon or something.

I wasn't really sure what I was supposed to do from here, what the commands were etc. I googled, and I turned up this page.

It's all about using a phone as an internet connection, something I was thinking about doing a few months ago, but didn't end up buying a new phone.

Anyway, it looks like the basic commands I need to know about are "hciconfig" and "hcitool".

First I ran hciconfig:

squigley@laptop:~$ sudo hciconfig
hci0:   Type: USB
        BD Address: 00:02:72:B0:00:26 ACL MTU: 192:8 SCO MTU: 64:8
        UP RUNNING PSCAN ISCAN
        RX bytes:111 acl:0 sco:0 events:14 errors:0
        TX bytes:310 acl:0 sco:0 commands:14 errors:0

Groovy, there's a device there. The RX bytes value looks interesting, maybe it can see something. I have no idea what, since I have no BT devices.. let's try to workout what it's seen..

squigley@laptop:~$ sudo hcitool scan
Scanning ...
squigley@laptop:~$

Nothing, oh well.

I wondered about that error, I wondered if it was something to do with the device being plugged in already. I decided to replug the device, and see what happened..

usb 1-1: USB disconnect, address 2
usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 3
usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 4
usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1: device descriptor read/64, error -71
usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using uhci_hcd and address 5

So I pulled it out, and it gave up "address 2", then I replugged it, and it took 3,4 and 5, while spewing errors about "device descriptor read", whatever that means.

It's still there, and it still doesn't find anything (not that I expected it to).