Recent Story Comments

You Saved the Day

Slat Rat — Sun, 24 Apr 2011 20:27:02 +0000

Andrew,

I LOVE you! Not only did you save the day, you restored marital harmony! I recently converted my Husband from Windows to a Mac. Everything has worked well - except for his Verizon Novatel U760 card. I suspected the issue was an old driver on the card, but I didn't know how to go about removing the old driver so the Apple built-in drivers would work.

Your instructions were crystal clear and your plist file works like a champ. For Verizon, the volume name is VZAccess Manager.

Thank you!!!

Steph

Thank You

Lacey McCaslin — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 20:52:48 +0000

Thank you so much for these intelligent instructions!! I am seventeen years old and I really don't know too much about computers. I got a macbook pro on sunday and have struggled all week trying to connect to the internet consistantly. I would fool around with files and every time the icon to connect at the top of the screen would randomly appear eventually but I didn't know how I got it up there. I called Bell and they had no idea what was wrong. Clicking eject without ejecting made it pop up immediately. You are a life saver...or a tleast a temper saver. Thanx again!

Signal Strength dislay

Rock — Sat, 22 Jan 2011 05:30:13 +0000

As for The Novatel U760 not communicating signal strength properly this appears to be a problem related to the Bell Connect stick.

I also have a Verizon MiFi which I setup the same way as the Bell Connect USB stick and the Verizon displays the signal strength very nicely. I did also setup the Mifi to auto-eject and it works nicely except that it requires two auto eject (must be in the Mifi card to retry once before giving up).

This was very smooth to install that way on Snow Leopard. I won't go in all the detail about conflict with Verizon and Bell I had when I installed both client on my Mac Leopard originally but it took me a lot longer to resolve then I had wished for and I also had to figure it out myself as Bell and Verizon tech support (level 3 support as well) did not provide any useful help.

The only thing really missing is the usage information provided by these clients but I always check on the web for accurate information so no big deal really.

Thousand thanks for great tip Andrew

Rock — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 17:30:11 +0000

I recently bought a new Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard 10.6.6 and could not get it to work. I still have my other Macbook Pro with Snow Leopard 10.5.8 where the key worked fine. However this was preventing me to upgrade that older Mac to 10.6.6 as I thought it the Bell driver did not work on 10.6 as it seems to indicate when u download their Mobile Connect on their web site.

However, your fix just did it great for me. Like Fred I found the The com.novatelwireless.nvtlserver.plist file in "launchDaemons" and I also removed the file "Mobile Conect.plist" in the same directory. Other then this everything work great.

Again thanks for posting this. I'm now off to install 10.6 on my older Mac and get to use iMovie 11 on it :)]

Thanks for the link. Seeing

andrew — Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:53:59 +0000

Thanks for the link. Seeing as it appears to provide no other improvements other then breaking the OS X menu applet, I can't see why it would be worth installing their drivers. If anyone does try it and finds any benefits, I'd be glad to know what they are.

New Novatel Drivers

Richard Outerbridge — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 19:46:48 +0000

Andrew, this is absolutely the more elegant solution - but Novatel has published supposedly SnowLeopard compatible drivers for the U760 from this link: < http://www.novatelwireless.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article... >

Now, let's see, which do I want? Two new 3rd-party System-level kernel extensions or a launchd script? Hmm... that didn't take long :)

ypbind is for NIS passwords,

andrew — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 04:11:27 +0000

ypbind is for NIS passwords, so it seems really strange that your system is doing that, unless you or someone else set that up. But, glad to hear that your kernel panics have stopped.

Novatel U760

Nils K — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:19:27 +0000

I sure am glad I found this article because I had about 19 panics, 1 about every 24 hrs. Bell could not help me till they finally tried with their workaround on the 19th of April about 10 a.m. edt. It did not work. Apple has not answered me yet since April 11th.
Yours has been working fine since some hours after that, I thank you very much.

I still have some strange happenings in some logs.
Window server: Apr 21 05:36:30 [70] kCGErrorIllegalArgument: CGXSetTrackingAreaOption : Invalid tracking area
system log: Apr 21 08:15:46XXXXXXXXXXXXX com.apple.DirectoryServices[15]: YP server for domain bell not responding, still trying
Apr 21 08:15:46 XXXXXXXXXXX ypbind[27]: dead domain bell

Glad to hear it's working for

andrew — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 17:53:36 +0000

Glad to hear it's working for you.

I wonder if the RunAtLoad key would make it work for a full shutdown? It makes sense what's happening, since a full shutdown will kill power to the modem, flipping it back to USB disk mode.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>ca.abdevelopment.umount-mobileconnect</string>
	<key>ProgramArguments</key>
	<array>
		<string>hdiutil</string>
		<string>detach</string>
		<string>/Volumes/MobileConnect</string>
	</array>
	<key>QueueDirectories</key>
	<array>
		<string>/Volumes/MobileConnect</string>
	</array>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Bell Mobile Connect on Snow Leopard

Fred Harris — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:53:46 +0000

Andrew, no system freezes for 24 hours - a miracle! A small correction to the above message. I did have to implement the automatic ejection of the MobileConnect Volume on startup. When I shut the system down and started back up the volume did appear. Restart it did not. Anyway all is working well now. Many thanks for your workaround.

Fred

Bell Mobile Connect on Snow Leopard

Fred Harris — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 19:52:07 +0000

Andrew, thanks for the above tip. Since moving to snow leopard with the Bell Mobile Connect program and the U760 USB stick, I have had consistent system freezes and messages to reboot! If I removed the USB stick and did not start the Mobile Connect program, my system ran fine!

I followed your instructions above but had to make a few changes to it. The com.novatelwireless.nvtlserver.plist file was not in the directory you specified but in "launchDaemons". Also in that same directory was a file called "Mobile Conect.plist". I deleted that also. Everything else went fine as per your notes. I did not have to automate the ejection process. After first reboot and establishment of the network connection, I shut down and rebooted the mac with the stick still installed - everything worked fine

Will let you know if using the native snow leopard drivers for the U760 stops my system freezes.

Fred

Both Bell and Rogers sell USB

andrew — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 17:16:10 +0000

Both Bell and Rogers sell USB adapters. They can't replace a wired connection as they both have pretty atrocious bandwidth limits; the Bell service is something like $30 / month for 6GB of transfer.

I did open Wifi sharing and it worked fine, but we were up north with no one around to try to steal internet access. Long term, if I needed secure wifi sharing, I'd either set up a VM with Ubuntu (Linux supports the U760 adapter as well), or a dedicated machine.

I also discovered by accident that my ancient cell phone is now supported for data transfer - 14.4 Kbps!

Yes! WWAN is a win.

Eddie Ma — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 16:57:22 +0000

When I first saw the built in option, I had incorrectly assessed that it implied that the wireless network cards shipped with Apple computers had WWAN capabilities; I'm sure one day, this will be a reality. How do you find the 3G USB stick? Can it replace a DSL/Cable connection for general internet access?

Now if Apple will just fix their internet connection sharing, and allow you to share out the 3G connection with WPA2 encryption over the built in aircard, things would be perfect.

(Apparently, there's no technical limitation-- WEP encryption is the only one offered because the feature has just slipped to the side.)