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As the title says, I am trying to set up a Huawei surf-stick (Huawei E303) on my raspberry 3B. The system is up-to-date and should be pretty clean.

I am trying to follow these guides:

https://raspberry.tips/raspberrypi-tutorials/usb-surfstick-am-raspberry-pi-verwenden-mobiles-internet

https://tutorials-raspberrypi.de/raspberry-pi-gsm-modul-mobiles-internet/

The stick is shown by lsusb as

Bus 001 Device 007: ID 12d1:14dc Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

both, with usb-modeswitch installed and uninstalled. However, I can't seem to get any further.

With the stick attached there is the problem that internet (via ethernet or built-in wifi) stops working. The wired symptom is that a download with wget (e.g. wget 'www.google.com') yields an index.html, but the content of the file is 'crumbled' (obviously it contains some binary code instead of the plain ascii). This will also cause apt-get to fail installing additional software.

Trying to proceed with the next step outlined in the first guide I am running wvdialconf. This gives

> sudo wvdialconf /etc/wvdial.conf
Editing `/etc/wvdial.conf'.

Scanning your serial ports for a modem.



Sorry, no modem was detected!  Is it in use by another program?
Did you configure it properly with setserial?

Please read the FAQ at http://alumnit.ca/wiki/?WvDial

With the stick attached, I also see the following additional network device with ifconfig:

    eth1: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST>  mtu 1500
    inet 192.168.8.100  netmask 255.255.255.0  broadcast 192.168.8.255
    inet6 fe80::1de0:f84f:6b83:1f79  prefixlen 64  scopeid 0x20<link>
    ether 00:1e:10:1f:00:00  txqueuelen 1000  (Ethernet)
    RX packets 44  bytes 16733 (16.3 KiB)
    RX errors 0  dropped 0  overruns 0  frame 0
    TX packets 62  bytes 6771 (6.6 KiB)
    TX errors 0  dropped 0 overruns 0  carrier 0  collisions 0

Note that I was able to get the same surf-stick running on a current ubuntu and its firmware seems up-to-date.

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  • It seems that this problem was caused by the stick not getting a network connection (strange symptoms). It is probably sufficient to do sudo apt-get install usb-modeswitch. I then did sudo usb_modeswitch -J -v 0x12d1 -p 0x1f01 which makes the output of lsusb change to the above. Before that the output contains 0x1f01. But this second step may not be necessary. The changes seem to be persistent. – highsciguy Jun 10 '18 at 14:13
  • 1
    feel free to answer your own question and accept it! These usb stick modems gave me such nightmares with the RPi. – Vincent P Jun 11 '18 at 14:18

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